Pacheco Aguilar, Raquel and Guénette, Marie-France, eds. (2021): Situatedness and Performativity. Translation and Interpreting Practice Revisited. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 209 p.

Rethinking translation processes seems to be a constant in Translation Studies today. Our discipline is moving towards new epistemological fields, beyond traditionally established boundaries. For some decades, Translation Studies has been focusing “on broader translinguistic aspects and transcultural processes” (Bassnett 2011: 72). Many publications show that ours is a field of research with “an impressive spectrum of topics approachable by means of a no less impressive set of tools or methods” (D’hulst and Gambier 2018: 1). Many theorists have contributed to broadening the limits by incorporating new concepts and challenges: from Dirk Delabastita’s “Translation Studies for the 21^st Century. Trends and Perspectives” (2003) to Yves Gambier’s “Rapid and Radical Changes in Translation and Translation Studies” (2016), Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer’s 2016 edited volume Border Crossings Translation Studies and Other Disciplines or Helle Dam, Matilde Nisbeth Brogger and Karen Korning Zethsen’s edited volume entitled Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies (2019), to mention just a few. One of the most recently published is Luc van Doorslaer and Ton Naaijkens’s The Situatedness of Translation Studies. Temporal and Geographical Dynamics of Theorization (2021), a volume which reassesses outdated definitions of Translation Studies through contributions describing non-Western conceptualisations of translation and translation theory in various cultural contexts, such as Chinese, Estonian, Greek, Russian and Ukrainian. What these and many other publications have in common is that they see Translation Studies as a discipline that must emerge and embrace other areas of knowledge and research methodologies. Expanding the definition of translation means re-examining “conventional understandings of what constitutes translation and the position of the translator” (Cronin 2010: 1). This also implies, no doubt, that new ethical questions will be generated and that the translator’s response, seen now as an active agent throughout the whole process of translating, will have to be new. It is within this context that Situatedness and Performativity. Translation and Interpreting Practice Revisited can be situated. In fact, the editors describe the field of Translation and Interpreting Studies as a varied and expansive one that encompasses different epistemologies and analytical frameworks. Their book is a very good example of this. The different chapters show the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary Translation Studies as well as its blurred limits and permeable boundaries. The different contributions go beyond text-centered thinking to examine how translation acts within the performing arts, as in the case of the artivist Guillermo Gómez Peña, thus including a multimodal perspective: how new views on translation imply trans-editing processes which reframe subjectivities in different cultural, temporal and situational environments, as in the case of the 2014 Hong Kong protests; or how situatedness and performativity appear when translating a Peruvian short story Alienación by Julio Ramón Ribeyro into American English. In all these case studies the contributors demonstrate how translation is today an important locus for raising questions connected to representation and to the linguistic construction of reality. The second section of the book goes on to show how translation and interpreting are not reducible to their more traditional definitions. The contributors explore here the different subjectivities involved in translation and interpreting apart from translators and interpreters themselves. And with their case studies they analyse the role played by agents, editors, booksellers, producers, consumers and others in production and dissemination processes. Thus, one case study looks at the roles played by three contemporary translators in the selection and production of translated Afrikaans literature in the Low Countries, another case study surveys the role of publishers, agents and literary organisations in the selection and promotion of Dutch-language literature in Italy and yet another case study explores how translators acquire a status that …