Corps de l’article

Standing somewhere between a collection of encyclopedia or handbook articles and a general introductory survey of the field, this book is an interesting contribution to current attempts to grasp, and also to guide, the development of our interdiscipline. It is both a richly sourced reference book on current research areas and methods, and an argument for a particular general view of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS). It covers both translation and interpreting, and gives good space to theories developed outside TIS itself.

The book opens with a short introductory chapter by the editors on “Exploring translation and interpreting,” constituting, by itself, Part I of the volume. This is where we find the rationale of the collection, and the overall framework of the argument. The editors advocate a post-structuralist approach, arguing against “essentialist” views based on “traditional positivist concepts” such as equivalence and fidelity. Some of this argument seems to me to be directed against straw men. Is it really true that TIS has up to now been focused, for example, on “inaccuracies in communication” and has overlooked “fundamental questions regarding access to comunication” (p. 5)? The importance of a reflexive research practice, of questioning traditional categories, acknowledging that all communication is context-bound, and avoiding unjustified “universalizing,” is surely not recognized exclusively by post-structuralists. “Positivist” concepts of representation may certainly need modifying in many contexts of research and practice, but mimetic representation is far from being irrelevant to medical, legal and technical translation, for instance, or to terminological work. Equivalence, fidelity and neutrality are values that serve usefully as regulative ideas in many T&I contexts.

The authors claim that “resistance to the post-structuralist understanding of the relationship of language to meaning, i.e. that meaning is constructed in the act of interpretation, remains strong” (p. 8-9). Two objections can be made here. One is that meaning is not necessarily either represented or constructed: we are not faced with an binary (essentialist?) choice here. In some contexts much construction of meaning may be needed, in others less. The second, more fundamental, objection is that neither positivism nor post-structuralism are empirical truths or agreed facts, but interpretations of (aspects of) reality. As such, they are not claims that can be proved to be either right or wrong, but views that may be adopted or rejected on grounds of pragmatic usefulness or e.g. ideological preference, and of course by weighing up the evidence for and against them. More generally, I think the editors’ assumption of a binary opposition between the paradigm of the hard sciences and that of the humanities is already history. For instance, quantum physicists accept that in some situations the observer can apparently affect the object observed, and humanists can easily accept that in some situations some meanings are more fixed and universal than in others.

Part II, “Mapping the field,” consists of 11 short chapters by different specialists on research areas the editors see as central to current and future TIS. They are arranged in alphabetical order: Agency and role; Bilingualism and multilingualism; Cognitive processes; Collaborative and volunteer translation and interpreting; Fictional representations of translators and interpreters; Gender and sexuality; History and historiography; Translation and interpreting pedagogy [which would be alphabetically better as Pedagogy of T&I]; Power and conflict; Profession, identity and status; Reader response and reception theory. Any such unstructured list is of course selective, and these topics can reasonably well illustrate the thrust of the anti-essentialist argument. However, other topics might also be seen as current in modern TIS, such as adaptation studies, contrastive textual analysis, work on translation memories or translation aids, or terminology and language policy.

Each chapter has the same helpful structure: Overview, Theoretical foundations, Evolution of the topic in TIS, Key studies, New directions, and References. The reference sections are long, making the volume a useful reference work. The focus is mainly on the development of the research topics themselves, within each area, rather than methodological issues or specific findings. Some chapters introduce interesting conceptual groupings. Jiménez-Crespo, for instance, deals with volunteer translation and interpreting together with collaborative T&I in general, as opposed to language mediation work by individuals: a fruitful juxtaposition. On the whole, the contributions to this Part are highly informative. Critical attitudes are not much in evidence, with some exceptions such as Sela-Sheffy, who warns of the risks of naive questionnaire research. Occasionally, the background theory cited is somewhat narrow: dicussing research on agency, Tyulenev relies heavily on Talcott Parsons, with scarcely a mention of Bourdieu. Here and there, a claim may prompt argument or disagreement. Writing about fictional translators, Kaindl assumes that “our knowledge about the world is ultimately always subjective” (p. 72), an idea that can indeed be debated. He also cites with evident approval another scholar’s claim that “we do not experience reality in an immediate way; it is always indirectly mediated through symbols, language, and texts” (p. 75). Always? What kind of small reality is this? And what kind of evidence for the value or validity of a point of view is the fact that someone else happens to agree with it?

Part III comprises 13 short chapters by different contributors on “Research methods.” These are also listed alphabetically, as follows: Action research; Bibliometric studies; Case studies; Conversation analysis; Corpus-based studies; Critical discourse analysis; Ethnography of communication; Experimental research; Histoire croisée; Interviews and focus groups; Narrative analysis; Observations [perhaps better in the singular?]; Survey-based studies. Additional possibilities might have been contrastive analysis, conceptual analysis and semiotics, all with long research traditions at least in research on translation. Perhaps mixed-method approaches would also have deserved a chapter. The writers have made good use of background sources outside TIS itself, but some more from within TIS could be added in future editions, such as Susam-Sarajeva (2009) on case studies, and Bowker and Pearson (2002) on corpus studies.

In this Part too, the chapters are similarly structured, with some slight variation: Definition, Origins, Uses, Sample studies, Conclusion and new directions / potential applications, Further reading, References. And here too, the comprehensive reference sections are very useful. Critical views of the various methods discussed are not given much room, with the notable exceptions of the essays by Mason (on critical discourse analysis) and Gile (on experimental research). Mason’s discussion of the risk of circular argument is very much to the point. However, I would not agree with him that the conduit model of communication has been “universally rejected” in TIS (p. 205); as suggested above, a conduit model, based on some notion of transferrable meanings, can be relevant and useful in some contexts. I would also question Baker’s assumption, concerning the centrality of narrative analysis, that narrative is “the only means by which we experience the world” (p. 247). The only means? Isn’t this too a kind of essentialism? The absoluteness of the claim risks losing the reader’s acceptance of the more modest, and more persuasive, claim that narrative is one important way of making sense of our experience of the world – compare my comment above, on the similarly dubious universalizing implication of a use of “always.”

In Part III, one contribution rather differs from the others: the chapter on Histoire croisée, by Wolf. It does not deal with the methodology of history research in general (which has in fact already been touched on in the Part I chapter on history) but with one particular, and highly complex, approach to historical research. And according to Wolf there have so far been only two T&I studies which have used this method. Claims concerning its potential relevance to TIS seem rather premature.

There is some overlap between the chapter on survey studies and the one on interviews, which could have been combined. Both cite the work of the social reform activist Charles Booth as a pioneer of survey research, with slightly varying dates. According to the Charles Booth Online Archive[1], his actual survey work on poverty in London lasted from 1886 to 1903, and was first published in two volumes, in 1889 and 1891. Some eyebrows might be raised at Sun’s claim that surveys are “probably the most common empirical research method in the social sciences and the humanities” (p. 269). The humanities too? Evidence? On the other hand, he makes useful critical comments on misunderstandings of Likert scales, and on other methodological weaknesses of questionnaire studies.

Regarding the purely technical side of editing, my eye was caught by a delightful misprint on p. 200, where mention is made of something called the “typo-token ratio,” instead of type-token. In fact, the “typo-token” ratio in this volume is impressively low, although future editions should correct the repeated slips (pp. 1 and 4) in the titles of the volume edited by Olohan (2000), which should be Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I), and the companion volume edited by Hermans (2002), which should be Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II). Better definitions might also be offered for ontology and epistemology (glossed as “what is” and “what we know about what is,” p. 6.). Both these are, after all, not collections of facts which are accepted to be true, but branches of philosophy.