Sergey Tyulenev. Translation and Society. London and New York, Routledge, 2014, 218 p.

The sociology of translation is one of the significant recent developments in the field of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS). There are a number of publications (e.g. Wolf and Fukari, 2007) that draw on sociological theories (e.g. Bourdieu, 1989) to study translators and translation. In line with this interest, Translation and Society investigates sociological theories and their pertinence to research in TIS. The author of the volume, Sergey Tyulenev from Durham University, is primarily interested in researching translation as a social activity and has experience teaching the sociology of translation. An earlier publication, Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies: Translation in Society (Tyulenev, 2012), develops a way to apply social systems theory (SST) to translation. Tyulenev’s research and teaching background puts him in a good position to develop, in this volume, a full-scale sociological approach to the study of translation. The main objectives of the book are to clarify the aims of studying translation from a sociological viewpoint, to strengthen the foundation of sociologically-informed translation research, and to open up new avenues to explore the sociology of translation. The book successfully meets these objectives, because Tyulenev most appropriately approaches not only translation but also translators sociologically. The first chapter explains why translation should be studied sociologically. It is argued that translation is a social activity because it mediates between peoples. In addition, translators are socialized individuals, who take their worldviews from the society to which they belong. Socialization influences the translators’ decisions and can be detected in their translation products. One example is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, in which details are believed to have been added by the translators unintentionally. In fact, in the course of interpreting some ideologically problematic passages, the translators’ socialization (i.e. the translators’ religious beliefs) influenced translational decisions unconsciously. Accordingly, Tyulenev concludes that sociology is a science which allows for theorizing translation as a social phenomenon. The second chapter of the book is devoted to culture, as a sociological category used in many social sciences including TIS. Culture comprises values and conventions, and these values and conventions are transmitted to individuals through society. The role of translation in the social transmission of culture is to mediate between cultures or subcultures (i.e. communities with their own cultures within a national culture), as well as between a given culture and its subcultures. The mediation of translation can be either intercultural or intracultural. To explain the intercultural role of translation, the author refers to the westernization of Russia. Translation facilitated the modernization of Russian society by introducing Western culture to Russian culture. As for the intracultural role of translation, a translator may observe a subcultural social group and translate his observations in a way that the target audience, who might be another subculture or the national culture, can understand. The discussions in the third chapter revolve around the question of socialization. Tyulenev draws on some theories of socialization that are applicable to the study of translation. For instance, he explains Freud’s theory in which the id, ego, and super-ego are considered to be three levels of human personality. The id represents selfish desires, the super-ego determines an individual’s behavior according to cultural norms, and the ego strives to strike a balance between the id and super-ego through sublimation. This theory is relevant to the study of translation since a translator (or, rather, the translator’s id) may have, for instance, a high level of creativity that is limited by his super-ego. This creativity would be then sublimated by the translator’s ego implementing unconventional translation strategies. Applying Freud’s theory to the study of translation allows for considering the forces …