Angelelli, Claudia V., ed. (2014): The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 140 p.

In recent years, the sociological turn in translation studies has yielded a broader view of translation as a social activity and of translators as socialized individuals. So far, translation scholars (for example, Tyulenev 2014; Buzelin 2005; Inghilleri 2005a; among others) have pertained various sociological theories, such as habitus and field, to the study of translation, constructing theoretical and methodological bases for investigating translation from a sociological perspective. However, not many attempts have been made to bridge the gap between sociological theories and empirical translation research. In this context, The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies moves away from mere theoretical discussions, examining translation sociologically through different case studies. The book comprises an editorial introduction and seven papers previously published in the special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies by John Benjamins (2012). The editor of the volume is Claudia V. Angelelli, from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (Scotland), who is known for her research in the fields of translation and interpreting studies, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics (see Angelelli 2004, to cite a work on interpreting studies). One of the achievements of the present volume is that it brings together concrete instances of sociologically-informed translation research. Thanks to the papers by Ben-Ari, Osman, and Song which draw on Bourdieu’s sociological theories to combine textual analysis with social analysis, the readers can gain an insight as to how sociological theories can be applied to different translation case studies. In this book, however, there is room for improvement in the content of three chapters – namely, the editorial introduction and the chapters allocated to Caliendo’s and Mason and Ren’s papers. The editorial introduction largely consists of a summary of the papers. In fact, the editor could have better contributed to this volume by providing more information, for example, on the aims and objectives of the book and on how it is situated in and contributes to the literature on the sociology of translation. As for Caliendo’s and by Mason and Ren’s contributions, although these studies are carried out on the basis of well-established methodologies, bringing them under the title of sociological turn is debateable, as it is not clear how they adopt sociologically-oriented methods in approaching the topics in question. In her paper on the role of translation in identity construction, Caliendo asserts that she “embraces the concept of translation as a socially-driven process” (p. 75); however, this theoretical framework has not adequately informed her research method. Caliendo identifies the translation strategies which make the source and target texts different in terms of identity formation, but this finding is not accompanied by any analysis of the recipient society or of the translator’s ‘social trajectory’ (Wolf 2007). To investigate identity issues in translation from a sociological outlook more efficiently, the author could have made some assumptions, for instance, as to the relevance of the identified translation strategies to the social dynamics governing the process of translation. Also, in Mason and Ren’s paper on the question of interpreters’ power in face-to-face interactions, the authors state that they use analytical insights such as networks of relations and voice to “complement the field and habitus frameworks” (p. 124) used in sociologically-oriented studies of interpreting (for example, Inghilleri 2005b). They do not, however, convincingly explain how their research may have such a function. Moreover, it is not clear how this research may epitomize a sociological turn in interpreting studies. With such analytical tools adopted by the authors, the analyses of various interpreting events in this paper go no further than showing how interpreters exercise their power by adopting various strategies. In general, Mason and Ren’s research can be …