Desblache, Lucile (2019): Music and Translation: New Mediations in the Digital Age. London: Macmillan, 407 p.

This book represents a milestone development in the combined interdisciplinary fields of Music and Translation Studies. Lucile Desblache presents a text which is engaging and rich in its reach across and through the fields of translation studies, music studies and musicology, multimodal studies and audio-visual translation. Her reach is unique as she is herself both a translation scholar and a musician. She has published much before about music and translation, and she led the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Network Grant, Translating Music. As such, Desblache is uniquely placed to meet her aims to take ‘a broad understanding of translation’ (p. 5) to explore how music can ‘convey meaning across boundaries’ (p. 4). As such, this book has many aims, which build on encouraging a wider scholarship to engage with the methods and concerns of translation studies to reflect on their own fields. The core aims are to ‘expand the existing framework’ (p. 9) for bringing music and translation into dialogue, to ‘review’ the ‘intersections’ between the field (p. 9), and to ‘investigate the creative influence of translation on music’ (p. 9). There has been a flourish of activity in this area in recent years. Ever since Şebnem SusamSarajeva edited a special edition of The Translator (2008) exploring the connections between music and translation, the field has opened up to question translation in song and opera further (Low 2016, Apter and Herman 2016). But, it has also sparked a wider appeal outside of translation studies. As the translational turn expanded the scope of translation studies more broadly to the humanities and social sciences, as explored by Doris Bachmann-Medick (2009), the meaning of translation has extended to reach all forms of communication and multimodal studies (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001). As the field of intercultural studies expanded into the performing arts, questions concerning how scholars might, can and do form interpretations across media, across cultures and across eras raise significant issues about how such interpretations are formed. In so doing, it has raised critical questions about the choices made by interpreters, and some, including myself, have made a claim that all forms of interpretation might be understood as acts of translation (Minors 2013). Since then though the translational turn has progressed to a medial turn in that our many forms of communication are becoming increasing digital, mediated via technology, and disseminated globally. As globalisation continues to expand, translation has clearly grown as a field, its methods and approaches providing ways for scholars to consider their place in the process of interpretation. As Venuti, who once claimed the translator to be invisible, now states that we need to look at ‘equivalence, retranslation, and reader reception,’ recognising the need to assess the ‘impact of translation’ not only on those reading it but on those producing it (2013: 1). As I note elsewhere, when ‘analogies are created to language’ as we see in the performing arts (2019: 158) and when we recognise there is a broader ‘meaning potential’ of texts (Kress and Leeuwen 2001: 10) it is indeed necessary, as Desblache does, to reassess and interrogate the field anew. To do this, she sets out the ‘Global Context’ in the first part of the book, establishing how music is used in different cultures, identifying traits, tropes and approaches which clarify what she refers to as ‘centres’ (p. 15) and ‘peripheries’ (p. 41). Desblache explores how musical texts are effected and influenced by translation in Chapter 3, notably acknowledging the problem and opportunities where the ‘(un)translatability’ (pp. 71-73) of the content is significant to interpretation methods. She refers to a range of institutions in order …