Alltranslation is a compromise-the effort to be literal and the e. ffort
to be idiomatic BenjaminJowett (1817-93) This book is designed to
provide intermediate and advanced students of English with practice in
the translation ofDutch texts into English. It contains fifty prose
passages, most of them taken from recent Dutch novels or journals, all
of them tried out on several generations of our own students in the
'pre-kandidaatsfase' of their studies at the English Department of the
University of Nijmegen. In these respects, it is not spectacularly
different from many other books ofits kind. We have, however, tried to
offer the student rather more support in his translation work than is
usually clone: each text is provided with a suggested translation of the
first few lines and with notes containing information on grammar and
idiom, sometimes preceded by supplementary material from British or
American sources. The second part of the book comprises a short
contrastive grammar speciallywritten to meet theneeds oftheuser. In this
way wehope to offer a self-contained translation course which reinforces
the interdependence of grammar, vocabulary, textual interpretation and
style. Most ofthe texts in this book are reproduced in substantially the
sameform and wording as in the original sources. In some cases editing
was necessary in order, for example, to reduce long articles to more
manageable proportions. In no cases, however, were we moved to doctor
the originals in order to disambiguate them or to make them easier to
translate.
