Muñoz Martín, Ricardo, ed. (2016): Reembedding Translation Process Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 218 p.

In his introduction, Ricardo Muñoz Martín suggests a dualist versus non-dualist explanation for the reframing of process studies in translation. Because the mind and the body were seen as separate in the past, studies of translation were decontextualized. The choosing of natural science models in linguistics was responsible for explaining language in terms of systems, for example de Saussure’s model of language as a system of signs. The humanistic approach to language, on the other hand, proposed metaphors, for example Newell and Simon’s (1961) comparison of computers and the mind, to model an understanding of how language works. From the historical and philosophical underpinnings of translation studies the author goes on to describe the development of process studies in translation. The impetus for supporting basic research in translation came from the failure of an approach to machine translation that was a purely computational and universalist approach. He suggests that the classic translation theories of the late 1950’s and the 60’s – Vinay and Darbelnet, Mounin, Nida, Catford, and Ludskanov – all contain traces of perspectives of machine translation and information processing. He characterizes the Leipzig School’s approach as describing translation as a special case of communication focusing on code-switching. For him, their work explored the rules for transferring between languages rather than the production and reception of meaning. It is not certain there would be agreement that the Paris School “did not dare to challenge the received views on mind, language, and meaning” or that the parallel with Chomsky regarding introspection and observation will be felicitous for all readers (p. 6-7). Muñoz Martín notes that the tool of think-aloud protocols introduced in the work of psychologists Ericsson and Simon gave translation scholars interested in a scientific approach to translation a method for empirical work. The technological developments that followed such as keylogging, videotaped screen captures, and eye tracking made empirical approaches more rigorous as did triangulation and multi-method approaches. He sums up translation process research as methodology-driven in the decade that followed. The author suggests that the traditional cognitive approach has not accounted for some new topics or for contradictory results in some research studies and proposes an alternative view of translation, cognitive translatology, which, citing Wheeler (2005), assumes that translation is embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and affective. He then concludes with a brief introduction to the other articles in the book, categorizing their contributions in terms of insights into the brain, the reembedding of tasks into their environment, working conditions and culture, emotions and translation, working with translation memory, attention, and translation from the perspective of the audience or reception. The second chapter in the book, A neuroscientific toolkit for translation studies by García, Mikulan and Ibáñez, explores the biological embededness of translation and interpreting through neuroimaging and electromagnetic techniques. They advocate that translation scholars become more familiar with these techniques to be able to explore the mental processes underlying interlingual reformulation in concert with specialists in other fields. They explain both non-invasive and invasive methods, the latter a by-product of clinical assessment. Their focus is on positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and direct electrostimulation. Their conclusions in brief show that, contrary to earlier assumptions, there are no dedicated areas of the brain responsible for translation and interpreting. They outline the constraints in this kind of research: the need to isolate an independent variable for study and ensure that all other factors are comparable in terms of the subjects (level of experience, etc.) and constant (the task and the procedures). Their review of the different brain imaging studies provides conclusions of the studies …