Duarte, João Ferreira, Assis Rosa, Alexandra and Seruya, Teresa, eds. (2006): Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins, vi-207 p.

In an entertaining article questioning the legitimacy of Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline, Singh (2007: 58) asserts that it “is perhaps the only field in the human and social sciences that seems NOT to focus on theoretical questions of its own,” and that wants “to establish itself on grounds that can be said to be maximally non-autonomist.” While we could dismiss Singh’s opinion as that of an outsider, we certainly cannot do likewise with similar opinions expressed by translation scholars. Venuti (1998: 8), for instance, has these terms to denounce the marginalization of TS in academia: “it is not quite a discipline in its own right, more an interdiscipline that straddles a range of fields depending on its particular institutional setting.” And because Venuti was not calling for academic rigidity but for more openness, particularly to Cultural Studies, Pym (1998) thought that he “somehow floated above translation studies and entered opinions about the world’s cultures.” Such remarks reflect a growing anxiety as regards the disciplinary identity of TS and its epistemological location within the humanities and social sciences. They also raise several questions. One could indeed ask Singh how to delineate theoretical issues so that they are certain to be exclusive to one discipline? Or ask Venuti how to delimit the borders of a discipline so that it becomes “a discipline in its own right”? One could also beg of Pym to explain how a translation scholar can talk of translation without talking of culture. Responding directly to this stance, Andrew Chesterman highlights the value of insight from sociology. He, thus, calls for “the sociology of translation” which includes the sociology of translations, the sociology of translators and the sociology of translating. He argues that while many of the theoretical models currently used in the sociological study of translation belong to either one of the first two sub-areas or to both of them at once, research has been scarce on the sociology of translating. To attend to this gap, he proposes the application of the concept of a practice and the actor-network theory, both borrowed from Sociology, to Translation Studies. In an almost identical vein, Yves Gambier points out that what he calls “sociotranslation,” which concerns itself with the study of both translators and translations, and “socio-translation studies,” which looks into the status of the discipline, among other issues, would both help Translation Studies to mature out of its current multidisciplinarity into a more “coherent” discipline. In fact, he affirms that TS conceptual borrowings overlap and are not put into perspective, which results in fragmentation (p. 35). Annjo Klungervik Greenall seems to subscribe to the same idea insofar as she argues that TS is currently more multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary (p. 68) and that a first step towards interdisciplinarity, and thus independence, would be the fusion of the linguistic and cultural approaches in TS. She proposes the Bakhtinian dialogism as a model that allows for such a fusion. In an excellent article that would, however, fit better into a volume about methodology in TS, Gideon Toury argues that much of the knowledge translation scholars claim to have and base their research on is but a set of “imported assumptions from other fields of knowledge” (p. 57) regardless of their ability to account for the complexities of translation. He, therefore, urges researchers to consider their claims of knowledge as assumptions or questions to “start looking for answers in a controlled way” (p. 65). As to M. Rosario Martin Ruano, she takes issue with the model of theoretical integration which calls for the creation of a common ground in TS. She argues …