Michael Cronin. Translation Goes to the Movies. London and New York, Routledge, 2009, 145 p.

Sherry Simon puts it well on the cover: “Michael Cronin is great company at the movies. [He] continues to ask the most pressing questions about cultural and linguistic diversity, and movies turn out to be a wonderfully rich frame of investigation.” This is not a book on the translation and inter-cultural distribution of Hollywood films. The latter become, rather, a seductive way to further the discourse on globalized modernity that threads through Cronin’s earlier work. The translators in this book do not labor behind the scenes in post-production editing. On the contrary, they are featured as characters in the narratives of popular cinema both past and recent, in films like A Night at the Opera (1935), The Alamo (1960), Star Wars (1977), Lost in Translation (2003), and Babel (2007). In their fictional worlds, they construct valuable representations of real-world inter-cultural dynamics. Cronin is not a cinema theorist here, but rather a culture theorist who happens to have chosen popular film as a forum to vitalize the key questions of his field. We are the luckier for it. Cronin takes us into the charmed spaces of Hollywood’s dream work, where a conception of translation developed previously in Translation and Globalization (2003) and Translation and Identity (2006) gains something of a glamorous exterior while losing none of its integrity. Coming to grips with this conception, however, requires a mode of reflection conditioned by the more expansive conceptualities developed by the cultural and post-colonial turns of the last three decades. For Cronin, translation is not confined to the narrow view of an inter-linguistic transfer of texts. It is extended, rather, to encompass any and all modes of mediation within the mobile liminal zones opening up and generating tension between the denizens of different cultures. Part and parcel of this more expansive conception is Cronin’s position on globalization: it is naïve to conceive of this phenomenon simply as a homogenization of world cultures on the model of the West. What globalization entails, on the contrary, is a new and more profound explicitation of difference as cultures, once remote, come into contact in increasingly complex ways, as the liminal zones multiply, generating tension and the need for mediation. This same argument informs the book’s first chapter, “Translation: The Screen Test.” In the early years of the 20^th century, there reigned the illusion that “the picture that moves is a universal language, a way of undoing the mishap of Babel” (p. 1). Silent cinema, Cronin suggests, can be seen as a way of silencing difference and turning the immigrant into the ideal American consumer. Then, after the advent of the talkies, large-scale production, and genre diversification—all coinciding with an increasing international circulation of American movies—it became clear that, like any other migrating object, cinema had to enter into a dynamics of inter-cultural re-contextualization, and would therefore demand mediation. The rest of the book, chapters two through five, examines representations of the inter-cultural arising from a number of Hollywood films spanning from 1935 to 2006. These chapters are thematically rather than chronologically organized, so I feel justified in a minor quibble regarding their organization: Cronin misses a wonderful opportunity for a meaningful inter-chapter dialogue by separating chapters two and four, “The Frontiers of Translation” and “The Long Journey Home,” respectively. These chapters really do belong together—perhaps not integrated in a single chapter, but certainly compared and contrasted in two consecutive chapters—as colonial and post-colonial visions of the same theme: the West’s incursion into, and mobility within the space of, the Other. In chapter two, Cronin takes on the Hollywood Western—Stagecoach (1939), The Alamo (1960), Dances …