Cornelia Zwischenberger and Alexa Alfer, eds. Translaboration in Analogue and Digital Practice: Labour, Power, Ethics. Berlin, Frank & Timme, 2023, 247 p.

The inherently collaborative nature of translation has been brought to the fore in recent years, particularly with the increasing visibility of online collaborative translation (Jiménez-Crespo, 2017; Yu, 2022). Extant literature has investigated collaborative translation in broadly two contexts—the pre-digital era and the digital era, leaving an impression of an “analogue/digital binary” (p. 9). Regarding translation in the digital space, there is a plethora of terms adopted, such as crowdsourcing translation, non-professional translation, volunteer translation, social translation, and digital translation, each of which highlights certain characteristics of online collaborative translation. In the meantime, the terms also raise questions as to where the “conceptual clarity” (p. 216) lies when it comes to the “emergence and establishment of [this] field of research” (p. 224), the impact of “non-professional” practices on translation as a profession, the ethics of crowdsourcing and volunteer translation, and how translation studies may “turn outward and start exporting its theories and concepts” (p. 116). The edited volume Translaboration in Analogue and Digital Practice: Labour, Power, Ethics has shed light on the abovementioned issues, providing us with insights into an enhanced understanding of collaborative translation and showcasing a wide variety of contexts in which collaborative translation is practiced. The volume has nine chapters which can be categorized under three themes: conceptual discussions (Chapters 1 and 5), translaboration in understudied contexts (Chapters 3, 6, and 7), and other topics (Chapters 2, 4, 8, and 9). Chapter 1, entitled “Translaboration in Analogue and Digital Practice: Labour, Power, Ethics” and co-authored by the two editors, opens the volume by interrogating the divide between the digital and the analogue when it comes to studies of collaborative translation in extant literature. This introductory chapter also discusses collaborative translation, as well as the notions of “online” and “digital” on a conceptual level, setting the tone for the chapters to follow. Machine translation (MT) has been incorporated more and more into online collaborative translation. In Chapter 5, entitled “Investigating Translation Concepts in Machine Translation: A Case for Translaboration,” Michael Tieber explores a conceptual and methodological “translaboration” between Translation Studies (TS), Computational Linguistics (CL), and Science and Technology Studies (STS), arguing that MT can potentially “function as an interdisciplinary ’platform’” and enable boundary crossing between the three (p. 112). Both TS and CL scholarly communities have been investigating MT, yet from their respective perspectives and with different foci. For the former, the application of MT and the ethics involved, the quality of MT output, and the changes it brings to translator training and industry are the issues that TS researchers often pay attention to. Humans, after all, still occupy a central role in the discussions on either “machine-centred collaborative translation” or “human-centred collaborative translation” (see Yu, 2022, p. 2). From a CL perspective, Tieber states that the focus is on the “design, the functionality, and the overall advancement of MT as a technical artefact” (p. 117). He argues that the convergence between TS and CL can be achieved by deploying the meta-concept of “translaboration,” which, as Alexa Alfer has noted, is “centrally concerned with the conceptual as well as the practical confluence of collaborative and translational processes” (2020, p. 269; italics in original). The term further emphasizes “[b]oth transdisciplinarity and transculturality” that “no discipline or part could generate alone” (Zwischenberger, 2020, p. 174). Tieber gives examples of “translaborative” MT research that uses STS and ANT (actor-network theory) in order to consider both “human and material agency” (p. 122). Similarly situated in the digital space, Chapter 4 by Xiaochun Zhang, entitled “Translation Is a Game: What Is ’at Play’?,” plays and plugs two interrelated concepts—play and game, arguing that “translation …