So, I've basically finished this book-- still some pages left, but the whole book is basically three short essays (lectures originally, I think) on the same subject, so I've got a decent idea of what he's saying. This is the most accessible of his books that I've read, though there are still some tough parts. I strongly recommend this to anyway interested in translation, literary theory, or phenomenology/hermeneutics. Ricoeur does a nice job of deflecting the theoretical impossibility of translation by focusing on the practical act of actual translation, which we can't deny is done, and compares it to the intralingual (is that the right term?) problem of translation in terms of circumlocutions and even just understanding someone else. After all, a dictionary is made of of words describing other words-- so translation is in a sense a fact of linguistic life. Well, there is much more that Ricoeur says, but much of it revolves around this redirection of our theoretical energies onto what actually happens and how we cope with it-- typical for properly done phenomenology, I think.
My initial comments are below.
I love Ricoeur, though I'm still just a baby in Hermeneutic Phenomenology, or whatever it is he does (I've heard H. Ph. described as his specialty, but I've also heard it applied to Heidegger). So far I've only read Richard Kearny's intro, but that in itself was worth the price of the book, with it's brief and understandable summary of the main trends in Ricoeur's thought, as well as a discussion of Ricoeur's treatement of the problem of translation, placing the book in the appropriate context of Ricoeur's impressive body of work.
This whole series, "Thinking in Action", is great-- easy to read books on current or perennial issues by leading thinkers of the day (Derrida, Zizek, etc), usually fairly slim and affordable. For my friends who don't get into theory and philosophy very often and want something of quality which is nevertheless fairly accessible (compared to what I have to read for my classes), this series is a good place to start. I'm currently working on or intending to get to this one, Hubert Dreyfus' "On the Internet", and Zizeck's "On Belief". I've only read a significant portion of Dreyfus' work so far, but it seemed very easy to follow.