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Inventions and Discoveries edited by Valerie-Anne Giscard D’Estaing,
Facts On File, distributed by Roundhouse Publishing, Oxford, pp 248, £13.95

‘Having topped the European best-seller charts for a decade’, says the
publicity blurb, ‘Inventions and Discoveries is now available in English.’
Although at first sight it seems to be excellent value for money, this encyclopaedia
should serve as an awful warning to any publishers who are currently updating
successful reference works. If they do not hire specialists to write or
check new entries, their economy will come home to roost with a vengeance.
The situation will be even worse if, as in this case, entries are blindly
translated.

The book covers just about every aspect of science and technology, with
lengthy entries ranging from the structure of DNA to the secret recipe for
Coca-Cola, and shorter entries on the Barbie doll, the Meikle threshing
machine and Soyuz manned spacecraft. There is also a list of Nobel prizewinners
and some fun oddities, such as indoor windsurfing, underwater hang-gliding,
and a bulletproof computer.

It looks as if the original text was sound, and probably originated
in the English language. The book also seems to have been jointly edited
by editorial teams in Paris and New York. Although the updates and recent
entries have been grafted into the main body of text, they will stand out
like a sore thumb to anyone who knows the fields they cover. This, in turn,
makes it impossible to trust the book in fields which the reader does not
know well. The publishers’ call for inventors to submit ‘anything that they
feel would be suitable for inclusion’, has had an unfortunate side effect.
Some entries are of very dubious significance. Although many entries refer
to patented inventions, and the flyleaf and editor’s note talk about patents,
no patent numbers are given. So readers cannot use the book as a source
for original references.

Here are just a few examples of the many muddled translations that undermine
what could have been a very useful project. Cassettes and CD players translate
as ‘platens’. The MAC TV system is described as ‘MAC Pacquet’. Ericsson
of Sweden gets the credit for inventing the cellphone in 1979, when Bell
Labs proposed the switching theory in 1947 and Motorola began trials in
1978.

The entries on consumer video tape, video disc, Dolby noise reduction
and cinema systems are full of garbled nonsense and irrelevancy. ‘Dual usage’
appears to be a two-lens camcorder and ‘communications terminal’ is probably
a pager. If it were not so dangerous to put pidgin rubbish into an encyclopaedia,
parts of this book would be as funny as an Inspector Clouseau film.

Publishers who cut corners on accuracy should not think that it can
pass unnoticed. Here they have, and it has not.