Maria Tymoczko. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. St. Jerome, Manchester, 2007, 353 p.

In the rhetoric of self-congratulation in Translation Studies, civil engineering provides a rich source of metaphor. Translators are always building bridges, opening up channels and laying foundations. And of course there are rogues on the construction site who ignore the health and safety regulations (ethics) and leave Babel with dodgy tower blocks, monumentalizing their own bad faith. Maria Tymoczko, in this important book, expresses her impatience with these complacent, irenic definitions of translation which naturalise specific Western historical experiences and universalize them as binding descriptions of what translation is and is not. The four chapters of Part 1 consider the implications of enlarging conventional understandings of translation practice and product, while the following four chapters in Part 2 investigate the notion of the empowerment of translators. The opening chapter sketches out an alternative reading of translation in the post-war period and chapter two addresses the core issue of how translation might be defined. In chapter three, Tymoczko explores the categories of representation, transmission and transculturation and analyzes their significance for the understanding of translation, and chapter four demonstrates how a broader understanding of the nature of translation would inform different research practices. Chapter five pays particular attention to the operations of translators in post-colonial societies as a means of engaging with ideas of empowerment, and chapter six looks at how holistic approaches to translation open up new perspectives for understanding the agency of the translator. Chapter seven takes on the central importance of theories of meaning for translation, while chapter eight investigates what ethics itself might mean for newly empowered translators. Tymoczko posits the Second World War was a crucial point of origin for dominant theories of translation in the post-war period. If linguistic theories of translation are born out of interests in code-breaking and intelligence gathering, functionalist theories emerge from wartime concerns with effective propaganda. If the two approaches diverge, they nonetheless share a broad belief in the value of positivistic approaches to defining and understanding translation. The positivist credo will come in for much criticism from the 1970s onwards, and a hermeneutics of suspicion around language, culture and texts will bring the post-positivist paradigm into translation research. In Tymoczko’s view, however, the post-positivist paradigm has not delivered on its promise and, to use the language of the revolutionary, there is much unfinished business. Part of the problem is that the implicit view of translation is one still beholden to literacy, the authority of the (written) word, power differentials, and a transfer hypothesis primarily concerned with a semantic theory of meaning. The view is largely the outcome of specifically Western engagements with canonical text formation, mainly in the area of Bible translation. So defining translation is not the idle exercise of the student debater or of the undergraduate greenhorn playing for time with extended citations from the OED, but goes to the heart of what the discipline of translations is about and where it might go. Tymoczko’s main argument is that the more we expand our definition of what translation is, the better our grasp of the many things that translation has been in different cultures in different places and at different times and, consequently, the more power and relevance we confer on translators and their agency. In the spirit of Descriptive Translation Studies, if we look at what translators actually do and how translations are in effect received, then we can begin to admit of very different forms of translation practice from those prescribed by a particular Western purview. In this context, Tymoczko draws on Wittgenstein, a philosopher who has figured in her previous writings on translation. She …