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Translation and Global Spaces of Power, edited by Stefan Baumgarten and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell, is a densely packed volume that displays both some of the strengths of the edited collection as a genre and some of its weaknesses. It continues the exploration of power in translation that the field has seen in studies using postcolonial, feminist, sociological, and critical discourse analysis frameworks, pushing these fields to connect to timely issues of globalization and shifts in the media landscape. Although similar in aim to Tymoczko and Gentzler’s Translation and Power (2002), this volume has the advantage of not only 17 years of intervening research on the topic, but a perspective that feels slightly broader and not quite as closely tied to literary and cultural studies.

The range of discussions is broad—linguistically, geographically, and temporally—although, as with many European edited volumes, still with something of a focus on European languages and histories (Turkish appears in two chapters, and Chinese in one). There is a mix of more theoretically-oriented work (Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell, Pantuchowicz, van Doorslaer, Lambert) and chapters organized more clearly around a specific core application, a case study, or a set of cases. There is also a mix between more familiar examples that are being repositioned in order to shed light on the topic at hand and examples that will be unfamiliar to most readers. In addition, the texts in question include corporate communications, political news, state policy, religious texts, history, and biography as well as film and literature. This variety adds depth and range to a topic that is both fascinating and essential in the field of translation studies. The one area that is very obviously underrepresented is interpreting; only two chapters (Schäffner and Baines) focus on interpreting, and even then it is only part of the content.

The frameworks envisaged by the editors, however, both in the “General Introduction” and in their own chapter, “Translation and the Economies of Power,” are not carried throughout the volume in such a way as to unify the various chapters as strongly as I think was intended. It is a little unclear if the volume is intended to remedy what the introduction refers to as a “lack of a convincing integrated approach towards questions of power in our discipline” (p. 1). If so, that seems like a particularly ambitious goal, particularly for a genre (the edited volume) whose structure does not lend itself to such an integration of a complex theoretical field. If that lack is merely being observed and the aim is to bear witness to the multiple layers and complex relationships of power in translation, then the contents of the volume are more than up to the task. Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell aim, to an unusual but welcome degree, to integrate the contributions in the volume, framing the chapters not only with an introduction along relatively standard lines, but with a conclusion which the editors describe in the introduction as being “a substantive chapter in its own right” (p. 7). The goal there seems to be to work towards an integrated approach that, as they noted early on, was lacking, but as a chapter, it seems to be trying to do two things at once that are organizationally at odds: be its own substantive chapter and draw the previous chapters together. It makes some new connections, while throwing some new concepts into the mix (social justice and ecological sustainability) that further complicate things.

Overall, however, this weakness is really only related to the conflict between the integrative theoretical aim of the volume and the inherent structure of the edited collection. The volume is rich and thought-provoking, and succeeds in the slightly less ambitious aim (but only slightly less) of highlighting the range of areas in which power and considerations of power are relevant in translation studies, as well as an impressive variety of ways of conceptualizing power and applying that understanding across a variety of case studies, meta-reflections, and disciplinary concerns. The conceptual frameworks proposed by Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell in the introduction (four social spaces of translation, three economies of translation, expanded on in their own chapter) as well as those brought in by the authors of other chapters (about identity, agency, policy, history, discourse, habitus, various forms of visibility and invisibility, ideology, censorship, branding…) outline a fantastically complex field of analysis within which to position and reposition ideas about translation.

The volume is organized around four different areas, partly related to the four social spaces of translation (agency, history, news media, business): “Translation and the Spaces of Power,” “Domination and Hegemony in History,” “Media Translation in the Global Digital Economy,” and “Commercial Hegemonies in the Global Political Economy.” The first part contains two more theory-oriented chapters, one on the concept of libidinal, digital, and political “economies” in translation, by Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell, and the other a reflection by Agnieszka Pantuchowicz on meaning, truth, and the other in deconstructivist terms, which posits translation as having or granting a power to oppose the “bloodlessness” (p. 27) of some contemporary academic thought. In the final chapter in this section, Luc van Doorslaer uses the situation of German-speaking Belgium to explore the spaces of majority and minority, and more importantly, the space between policy and practice.

The second section opens with a chapter by Karen Bennett that explores Luther’s Bible translation and feminist Bible translations from the perspectives of power and agency, repositioning some familiar and some less familiar examples with respect to the topic of the volume. Marion Löffler’s chapter stays in the area of religious translation, but shows how translation from English into Welsh used such strategies as selection, omission, and domesticating translation for radical political ends. The following chapter, by Maria Sidiropoulou and Özlem Berk Albachten, presents a fascinating diptych of translations into Turkish and Greek of a single English text on the history of the Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923, which shows convincingly how the translations reflect and constitute the respective cultural understandings of the event, but also how the three texts (ST and two TTs) interact with Baudrillard’s notion of simulation. Rounding out these more historical explorations, Cristina Gómez Castro examines systems of censorship and self-censorship in Francoist Spain through the medium of translations of bestsellers, with a focus on representations of gender and morality.

The section on media translation opens with an updated translation of an article by José Lambert that first appeared in the journal Target in 1989. The later part of the chapter on audiovisual translation, I think, slightly misses the mark as regards updating, but it is clear that, as the author observes in his introduction to the translation, many of the issues raised regarding media and globalization are still relevant and still have not been fully explored. Christina Schäffner presents a number of examples of translation and interpreting from international politics to nuance the notion of agency and power, in a chapter that calls attention not only to the complexity of power in the actual translational or interpreting relationship, but also in the processes and structures of transmission of texts. The complexity of transmission and translation appears as well in M. Cristina Caimotto’s chapter, which presents the notion of proximisation[1] and a speech by Barack Obama announcing the death of Osama bin Laden to demonstrate the liquidity of modern communications and illustrate how the movement of discourses across linguistic boundaries can illuminate the workings of power by making certain discursive moves more visible. She relates this visibility to Baudrillard’s notions of hegemony and dominance, terms that appear (although perhaps not in an explicitly Baudrillardian sense) in two of the section headings of the volume itself.

The final section focuses on uses of translation in commercial spheres. Roger Baines examines the ways in which translation and interpreting are managed by English Premier League football (soccer) club managers in the interests of club branding and reputation, and by individual players whose native language is not English in ways that sometimes run counter to the club’s interests, often using translation as an excuse or scapegoat for critical comments designed to signal their own economic interests. Another area of mass cultural consumption is the focus of Jonathan Ross’s chapter, which explores the strategies of film title translation used by Turkish film distributors, differentiating between companies depending on their level of affiliation with large multinational film conglomerates. Finally, Pei Meng uses a Bourdieusian framework to examine the habitus, not of translators, but of a literary agent who has been responsible for getting a number of Chinese autobiographies published in the UK.

As mentioned above, the volume concludes with a final chapter by Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell that picks up on some of the connections within the volume and suggests directions in which the conversation can be moved forward. Those connections are, I think, also picked up, as I noted earlier, by the section titles, which, although they do not precisely mirror any of the frameworks given by Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell (the four spaces, three economies), pick up on those as well as on the frameworks proposed by various contributors, suggesting further connections that can be made. The overall notion of spaces is foregrounded by Part I: “Translation and the Spaces of Power”; domination and hegemony, drawn on by Caimotto, appear in Part II, “Domination and Hegemony in History,” and Part IV, “Commercial Hegemonies in the Global Political Economy;” Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell’s economies appear in both Part IV just mentioned and in Part III, “Media Translation in the Global Digital Economy.”

Overall, the volume provides much food for thought, both in terms of the applications of conceptual frameworks for the study of power and in terms of the introduction of fascinating examples and situations, and the recontextualization of some familiar ones. I would be quite happy to see a number of the directions from this volume turned into their own stand-alone monographs, to explore more fully and push harder on the concepts and situations that they explore.