Berré, Michel, Costa, Béatrice, Kefer, Adrien, et al. (2019): La formation grammaticale du traducteur: Enjeux didactiques et traductologiques? Lille: Septentrion, 270 p.

Succeeding waves of “communication-based” approaches to language learning throughout the 20^th century seem to have firmly established the idea that formal grammar teaching has little or no role to play in the language learning process. It is not surprising then that the idea of training students of translation in the arcana of comparative linguistics has been the object of fierce controversy over the years. This collection comes down firmly in favor of the idea that comparative grammar can and should be taught to students of translation. A meeting in 2017 brought together specialists of discourse analysis, grammar and translation theory from Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and Germany, sixteen of whom contributed to the book. Its fourteen chapters, twelve in French, two in English, are organized into four sections. The opening chapter, written collectively by the six editors, serves as an introduction, setting out the contents of each article and showing how each answers the central questions raised here and seldom addressed elsewhere: not simply should one teach grammar, but rather how can it be done most effectively? Which linguistic framework should be used? What particular language problems should be addressed? How can the teacher effectively convert theory into efficient and effective practice for the student? The four chapters of Section 1 are devoted to the question “What grammar do translators need?” Peter Blumenthal (Analyse contrastive de la cohérence: enchainer les idées en français et en allemand) first looks at the problem of coherence, focusing on newspaper articles in French and German. French, he argues, often uses a “hierarchical” approach to textual coherence, where the link to the central topic is maintained by a series of “expressive” adverbs placed at strategic points in the text. The use of the passé simple verb tense allows French to maintain linear coherence between events which German must compensate for through time adverbs like und dann. German, on the other hand, uses anaphoric adverbs like auch to establish equivalence in ways which are difficult to translate into French. Moreover, its rich array of compound structures allows the former to link words in the same semantic field, while French must try to compensate with various sorts of lexical expressions. In the second chapter of this section, Michael Herslund (Typologie lexicale, grammaire et traduction) compares the lexicons of French and Danish in search of a general “typology” through which the semantic components of lexical items in Romance and Germanic languages could be codified in the spirit of Talmy (1985). His carefully thought out discussion examines in turn verbs of movement and position, the “qualia structure” of nouns (Pustejovsky 1995) and the semantic complementarity of verbs and nouns. French verbs of movement, for instance, encode [direction] in the verb and either leave [manner] to the context, or add a prepositional complement: sortir en courant. Danish however encodes [manner] in the verb and expresses [direction] through a co-predicate: løbe ud. French nouns, contrary to Danish, do not have a common root from which to derive specific descriptive terms. So, a Danish series like personvogn, barnevogn, indkobsvogn, etc. can only be expressed in French by distinct terms like voiture, landau, chariot, etc. For Herslund, as for Blumenthal, the lexicon plays a crucial role in the typology of languages and is something the translator needs to pay careful attention to. The lexicon is also the focus of interest in Jean Szlamovicz’s article Lexique, valeur référentielle et domaine notionnel: pour une sémantique traductive. The notion «domaine notionnel …