Angelelli, Claudia V. and Brian James Baer, eds. (2016): Researching Translation and Interpreting. London/New York: Routledge, 291 p.

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 …