Wang, Caiwen and Zheng, Binghan, eds. (2021): Empirical Studies of Translation and Interpreting. The Post-Structuralist Approach. New York: Routledge, 286 p.

Empirical Studies of Translation and Interpreting. The Post-Structuralist Approach gathers together a collection of thirteen chapters written by pundits and experts in the domain of Translation and Interpreting (T&I) Studies. The renown editors have given much credit to the importance of this volume from the “Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies” collection. Dr. Caiwen Wang is Senior Lecturer in T&I at the University of Westminster, UK, and Associate Professor at University College London, while Dr. Binghan Zheng is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Durham University and Director of the Centre for Intercultural Mediation at said university.

The volume offers some of the most recent studies on T&I by researchers from different international backgrounds working on funded projects or other ongoing work. Many of these papers have been presented at the latest T&I conferences. The book intends to highlight the importance that translation and interpreting have recently acquired from the post-structuralist point of view, reflecting on the empirical turn in which we are immersed in. As the editors themselves put it, the volume “ha[s] shown slightly more invested interests in studying some areas of T&I than others, noticeably ‘Product of T&I’” and reveals to readers that it represents “a cross-section of the latest developments in T&I studies” (p. IX).

The book is divided into five sections in which chapters are embedded according to their scope: Part I (“Intervention in T&I”), Part II (“Process of T&I”), Part III (“Product of T&I”), Part IV (“T&I and Technology”) and finally Part V (“T&I Education”). As it can be deducted from the above titles, the editors have not hesitated to include newer perspectives on all the different areas of interest in T&I in the volume, accepting papers of the highest standards and which, at the very same time, are a mirror of current trends in T&I. No one could deny the interest that the sections in which the volume is divided offer to the study of our field. And there lies one of the most important cornerstones of the book: its usefulness, guidance and fresh look into a domain which is constantly changing and adapting to a demanding world.

In Part I, Rebecca Tipton, author of the chapter “Biopolitics, Complicity, and Community in Domestic Abuse Support Settings: Implications for Interpreter Guidance” (p. 9-28), draws on the need for support guides for interpreters working in charity-related services and with victims of domestic abuse. The author compiles the outcome of different previous studies and reflects on the findings of recent experimental research. From a biopolitical approach, she proposes to conceptualise victim support through the mediation of interpreters in order to assess the different scenarios of violence to which interpreters are often exposed.

Natalia Rodríguez Vicente, Jemina Napier and Raquel de Pedro Ricoy, under the title of “Dialogue Interpreting and Person-Centred Care in a Clinical Mental Healthcare Setting” (p. 29-48), explore in a qualitative analysis to what extent interpreters’ performance can be improved when working with patients whose linguistic and cultural backgrounds are different according to the protocols and principles governing health services. The main result of the study is that interpreters could have an impact “to affect participants’ talk in ways that may influence the accomplishment of person-centred communication” (p. 44).

Part II contains two chapters, “Effect of Perceived Translation Difficulty on the Allocation of Cognitive Resources Between Translating and Consultation: An Eye-Tracking and Screen-Recording Study,” by Yixiao Cui and Binghan Zheng (p. 51-73) as well as “Navigating the Web: A Study on Professional Translators’ Behaviour,” by Claire Y. Shih (p. 74-94). In the former, the authors investigate whether the balance of resource allocation to translating and consultation is affected through an increase in perceived translation difficulties. Using a study combining qualitative and quantitative methodology, they report that as perceived translation difficulties increase, so does the time that students in T&I spend translating and consulting.

In the latter, the behaviour of professional translators is analysed as they consult different websites during the documentation process that takes place during translation. The author concludes the study with a list of primary and secondary actions that take place in a complementary way as a form of translators’ behaviour from a cognitive point of view. Primary actions are related to terminological and language-specific issues, while secondary actions are related to skimming action, reading action and scanning action.

Part III investigates the product of four contributions: “Conference Interpreting in Diplomatic Settings: An Integrated Corpus and Critical Discourse Analysis,” by Fei Gao and Binhua Wang (p. 95-113), “A Creative Approach for Subtitling Humour: A Case Study of the Political Comedy Veep,” by María del Mar Ogea Pozo (p. 114-136), “Explicitations in Political Texts and the Translator’s Rationale,” by Caiwen Wang (p. 137-155), and “A Corpus-Driven Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Interpreted Discourses in Political Settings,” by Bing Zou and Binhua Wang (p. 156-178). The first one reviews the moderations of interpreters who have to deal with political texts using the support of CDA and corpus linguistics as a basis. After their extensive study, the authors conclude that in the case of Chinese conference interpreters, they tend to mediate political discourse with a sense of solidarity and obligation that is not present in the original speeches. Ideational information remains close to the original, while interpersonal information is constantly subject to change in the interpretation.

Dr. Ogea Pozo’s study analyses the translation of political satire humour for subtitling in a context where different socio-cultural considerations have to be taken into account and which affect the restrictions of subtitling. The author concludes that translators must perform several mediations whilst the main objective pursued by them is to remain faithful to the equivalence of the original text. This is due in part to the versatility of humour, which can acquire more than one form in the same context, the author states.

The third paper examines the extent to which explicitations were used in translating figures of speech in political texts and the motives behind such decisions. Drawing on a parallel corpus as well as on retrospective interviews and questionnaires, Dr. Wang concludes that explicitations take place as a response by the translator to a communicative and, more specifically, a cross-cultural challenge. In the author’s words, “explicitation is more about abstaining from causing non-understanding or sounding translationese than about avoiding misunderstanding” (p. 151).

The last chapter of Part III concludes with the contribution of Dr. Zou and Dr. Wang, who devote their contribution to the study of textual types and genres of interpreted political discourse. For the authors, the four types of political discourse analysed in their study are very close and suggest that the form of interpreted political discourse is more akin to a professional letter than to an oral discourse.

Part IV concentrates on two chapters about T&I and technology, whose titles are “Measuring the Impact of Automatic Speech Recognition on Number Rendition in Simultaneous Interpreting,” by Elisabetta Pisani and Claudio Fantinuoli (p. 181-197), and “Machine Translation Problems at Discourse Level: Pro-Drop Language and Large-Context Machine Translation,” by Xiaojun Zhang (p. 198-216). Dr. Pisani and Dr. Fantinuoli investigate the real use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) together with its implications, potentials and development when it comes to translating numbers during a simultaneous interpretation. Their study concludes that interpreters could reduce the error rate by introducing ASR technology as a support when interpreting a speech dense in numbers. When ASR is used, interpreters can reduce their error rate by up to a 25%, as their study reports.

Furthermore, Dr. Zhang reflects on the basics of machine translation (MT) and discourse. The author analyses discourse problems in MT outputs and describes a brand new approach whose aim is to search and implement translation qualities. It is based on neural machine translation (NMT) and statistical machine translation (SMT). When used together, especially when integrating cross-sentence context into NMT, the study assesses that both approaches are capable of providing a model that “significantly outperforms a strong attention-based NMT baseline system” (p. 212).

And last, but not least, Part V focuses on the topic of education and teaching in T&I, and includes three chapters: “Taxing Brings Benefits: The Interpreter Advantage in Emotional Regulation,” by Yiguang Liu, Hailun Huang and Junying Liang (p. 219-239), “Flipped Classrooms and Translation Technology Teaching: A Case Study,” by Piero Toto (p. 240-258) and finally “An Empirical Study on Distance Interpreter Training in China Before the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mixed-Methods Approach,” by Mianjun Xu, Tianyuan Zhao and Juntao Deng (p. 259-280).

In the first one, the authors present the first empirical paper which intends to address the psycho-emotional dimension of interpreting studies. As Dr. Liu, Dr. Huang and Dr. Liang put it themselves, their findings suggest that emotional regulation in domain-general settings can be improved thanks to interpreting training. To reach this extent, they describe the advantages of emotional regulation deriving from task taxing cognitive functions which are required when interpreting. Their research is innovative in that it helps interpreters get rid of emotional distractions and interruptions when interpreting.

Dr. Toto, in the second one, demonstrates that using the flipped classroom approach in teaching translation is possible and promotes the use of this perspective in translation as a way to enhance the competencies and strategies that students develop during their learning process. Even if “flipping” classes may not be the preferred approach for all students or tutors, the success of this proposal “relies on students being accountable for out-of-class learning and for attending lessons after having revised the relevant materials and theory” (p. 255).

Finally, Dr. Xu, Dr. Zhao and Dr. Deng investigate the relevance and opportunities that massive open online courses or MOOCs offer to interpreters concerning real contexts. They study the perception that these courses can offer to interpreting teaching. From a quantitative and qualitative point of view, they collected data from interpreting teachers through a questionnaire and some guided interviews and they concluded that this study could give readers the opportunity to understand distance interpreter training (DIT) much better in China, and especially those factors concerning the advantages and disadvantages of their use in the classroom. Although their results could be first taken into consideration in a Chinese environment, their findings are subject to several implications from a more global point of view.

The book aims to reflect on a cross-section of empirical studies on translation and interpreting that have been carried out to date. The contributions that comprise the volume have much potential and have the expected scientific rigour for such a volume. The editors also point out, as a note of interest, that most of the contributions received were related to the English and Chinese languages (p. 4), a fact that may be of particular significance. In any case, the volume has three important components, which, in a complementary way, help better understand the empirical situation in which Translation Studies currently stands: on the one hand, the work proposes an updated approach based on the internationalising trend promoted by our profession; on the other hand, it provides a response to the empirical turn and the different demands of the 21^st century. Finally, it fully adopts the post-structuralist approach, meaning that it is centred more on the social and communicative implications and practices than on assessing the literal fidelity of a translation. In short, the volume is seen as a renewed approach that responds to the current needs in translation and interpreting, both from a professional, didactic and research perspective.

Just as the title of the volume indicates, this book is conceived as a practical guide to describe the current trends in empirical studies in T&I, focusing mainly on the post-structuralist point of view. Its interest is noteworthy, not only by the updated and new fresh look that every chapter explores in our field of study, but also because of the great enthusiasm in advanced studies that it offers to our area. T&I is one of those branches of knowledge whose heart is in continuous motion, hence forcing translators and interpreters to be constantly updated and in the search of new methods of application and functioning when conceiving the immense task they (we) are given in our profession: to promote knowledge between languages, to reunite families and friends through mediation as well as to bridge gaps for all those who do not have the tools and who are in need of help. In sum, the present volume is a comprehensive source towards the understanding of our profession and will provide a powerful stimulus to the development and growth of T&I Studies from the post-structuralist approach.