Baumgarten, Stefan and Cornellà-Detrell, Jordi (2018): Translation and Global Spaces of Power. Bristol/Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 248 p.

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 …