Munday, Jeremy, ed. (2009): The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, revised edition, Oxon: Routledge, 285 p.

This volume of the series Language Studies and Linguistics, addressed to students, researchers, and professionals of translation, brings to the fore an authoritative voice on interfaces among linguistics, context, culture, politics, ethics, cognitive theories, technology, interpreting and audiovisual translation. Its contributors offer the readers invaluable insights into translation studies, “providing,” in editor Munday’s words, “an overview, a definition of key concepts, a description of major theoretical work and an indication of possible avenues of development” (p. 1). The volume opens with an introductory chapter – Munday’s Issues in Translation Studies – which brings a brief history of translation from Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman rhetorician and orator, to St Jerome, the translator of the Bible. Munday calls attention to the strategies adopted by these translators and their annotated comments on their translating work. He brings historical texts and references into the scene with a view to guiding the reader towards the influential contribution of classical translators, claiming that “persistent revisiting of such writings has transfused translation studies in recent decades” (p. 4). Munday examines Holmes’s insightful contribution to the field with his naming the area Translation Studies, in 1972, a designation still in use today to refer to the disciplinary field established in early 70s. Considering the task of defining translation “a notoriously slippery action” (p. 6) Munday concentrates on “the ambit of translation” with its three aspects: “(1) the process of transferring a written text from SL to TL, conducted by a translator, or translators, in a specific socio-cultural context; (2) the written product, or TT, which results from that process and which functions in the socio-cultural context of TL; (3) the cognitive, linguistic, visual, cultural and ideological phenomena which are integral part of (1) and (2)” (p. 7). Despite its inclusiveness, Munday concedes the limitation of his proposed meaning for the term, suggesting that “such definitions still do not answer the question of the limits on translation and the boundaries between translation, adaptation, version, transcreation, etc. that have key implication for the criteria by which the target text is judged” (p. 7). Additionally, Munday focuses on the roles cultural studies play in translation. He refers to the relevance of Bassnet and Lefevere’s (1990) expression cultural turn, mentioning the shift that the term has caused to the research paradigms, and the resulting consequences on the notion of ST-TT equivalence, on the agents of translation and interpreting, and on fragmentation of the discipline. Munday enlarges the scope of the chapter with the “challenges to perceptions of translation,” not only insisting on the fact that “translation is an intercultural phenomenon” (p. 18), but also on the idea that the cultural turn ushered in a stream of investigation that transformed the discipline and what is understood as translation, thus aligning himself with Tymoczko’s (2006) insistence on “the need to challenge presuppositions that have dominated the discipline” (p. 18). Additionally, he presents a brief summary of the volume with the content of each chapter and contributor’s thoughts, and the role of key concepts at the end of the book and their connection with the ideas discussed by researchers in general and the contributors in particular. Chapter two, Newmark’s The linguistic and communicative stages in translation theory, initially looks at the different phases translation theory has gone through from the 1950’s to 2000’s, namely the linguistic, communicative, functionalist and ethic/aesthetic ones, later concentrating on the linguistic and communicative one. Nida (1964) is, here, referred to as the most influential world figure in translation because he has created the first theory of communicative translation, putting forward the notion of functional …