1120727

book-review20222022
ISY0010.1177/27523810221120727Interpreting and Society: An Interdisciplinary JournalBook review

INTERPRETING
AND SOCIETY
Book review AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL

Interpreting and Society:

Book review
An Interdisciplinary Journal
September 2022, Vol. 2(2) 199­–203
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/27523810221120727
DOI: 10.1177/27523810221120727
journals.sagepub.com/home/isy

Empirical Studies of Translation and Interpreting: The Post-Structuralist Approach, edited by Caiwen
Wang and Binghan Zheng (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies).
Routledge: New York/London, 2021. 285 pp., $160 (hbk) ISBN 9780367856106, $160 (pbk)
ISBN 9781032005515, $160 (ebook) ISBN 9781003017400.

Reviewed by: Tianyuan Zhao and Lin Shen, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China

In the 1970s, a growing body of post-structuralist research focused on the subjective ini-
tiative of practitioners and the game of power relations in society. Meanwhile, the empiri-
cal turn in translation studies began to emerge, and in the 1990s, a post-structuralist
shift—the post-structuralist turn—in empirical translation research began to take shape
and broaden the scope of translation studies from texts to the cultural, ideological, and
social factors involved (Schäffner & Bassnett, 2010; Wang, 2020). Enriching the subjects
and perspectives of empirical translation studies, post-structuralist research has been
widely embraced in recent years.
Co-edited by Caiwen Wang (University of Westminster) and Binghan Zheng
(University of Durham), and composed of the research findings of academics from
China, Britain, Germany, and Italy, the book presents the latest international empirical
research findings in translation studies in 2020 from the post-structuralist approach. The
book consists of 13 chapters. Of particular interest to researchers and practitioners in
interpreting studies are chapters 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, and 13.
Part I, Intervention in T&I, consists of Chapters 1 to 2, and mainly discusses the rela-
tionship between T&I practice and society, focusing on the social influence and roles of
interpreters. Chapter 1 “Biopolitics, complicity, and community in domestic abuse sup-
port settings: Implications for interpreter guidance” by Rebecca Tipton uses simulated
ethical encounters and interviews to investigate the ethical codes of interpreting in
domestic abuse support settings. The paper concludes that simulated training is a premise
to maximise the guiding functions of ethical codes. The study and its findings provide
methods and materials for the teaching of professional ethics in community interpreting,
thereby enhancing academic discussion on community interpreting.

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under

the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use,
reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed
as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
200 Interpreting and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2(2)

Based on the person-centred principle, Chapter 2 “Dialogue interpreting and person-

centered care in a clinical mental health care setting” by Natalia Rodríguez Vicente,
Jemina Napier and Raquel de Pedro Ricoy studies the social role of interpreters in clini-
cal communication, and the interpreter’s impact on clinical decision-making processes.
Using field surveys and interviews, the authors reveal that interpreters play a significant
role in clinical communication with the addition of information such as “even if that
would save your life.” Interpreters may also obstruct communication by omitting
patients’ religious concerns. This study, with its vivid cases, highlights the importance of
education on the interpreter’s roles and ethical codes in community interpreting.
Part II, dealing with the Process of T&I, and comprised of Chapters 3 and 4, outlines
various advanced tools in T&I research. Chapter 3 “Effect of perceived translation dif-
ficulty on the allocation of cognitive resources between translating and consultation: An
eye-tracking and screen-recording study” by Yixiao Cui and Binghan Zheng uses read-
ability indices, cognitive load surveys, and fixation duration data to determine the per-
ceived translation difficulty and analyse students’ consultation during the translation
processes. The measurement of difficulty can draw the attention of interpreting research-
ers to the evidence-based evaluation of difficulty instead of subjective judgement, which
is helpful in selecting materials for interpreting teaching and testing.
Chapter 4 “Navigating the web: A study on professional translators’ behavior” by
Claire Y. Shih investigates the types of queries made by professional translators via eye-
tracking, screen recording, and interviews. The author shows five types of queries and
concludes that professional translators also prefer “browsing without clicking,” to avoid
time-consuming reading afterward. The results may provide a reference for pre-transla-
tion and pre-interpreting preparation in interpreting education.
Part III deals with the T&I product, and consists of Chapters 5 to 8. This section
mainly focuses on the differences between the source and target languages. In Chapter 5
“Conference interpreting in diplomatic settings: An integrated corpus and critical dis-
course analysis,” Fei Gao and Binhua Wang use systematic functional linguistics to ana-
lyse a bilingual interpreting corpus of diplomatic speeches. The study reveals a
significantly increased use of first-person plurals and obligatory modal verbs in Chinese-
English diplomatic interpreting compared with the source material. These results offer
evidence for the social influence of interpreting in contributing towards the building of
the national image, and may thus inspire further research focused on the socio-cultural
dimensions of interpreting.
Based on the concept of creative translation, Chapter 6 “A creative approach for sub-
titling humour: A case study of the political comedy Veep” by María del Mar Ogea Pozo
looks at humor from the perspectives of language, logic, identity, culture, and taboo.
Tagging the translations as either conservative or creative, the study further investigates
the audience’s satisfaction rates. The results indicate a preference for subtitling transla-
tions with creative strategies. The measurement of satisfaction rates used in this study
may inspire more research on an audience’s satisfaction of an interpreted event.
Based on the hypothesis of translation universals, in Chapter 7 “Explicitations in
Political Texts and the Translator’s Rationale,” Caiwen Wang builds a parallel corpus of
the Chinese book《中国周边安全形势评估》and its English translation China’s Belt
and Road Initiatives and Its Neighbouring Diplomacy to examine the rationale behind
explicitation in political translation. Also using interviews and questionnaires, Wang
Book review 201

shows that explicitation is often used to avoid “translationese” and improve audience
acceptability. This study sheds light on the nature of translation as communication of
information and illustrates that the translator and interpreter while maintaining fidelity
and respecting institutional norms, can use diverse strategies to ensure the smooth recep-
tion of information.
Guided by the multi-dimensional analysis framework (Biber, 1988), Chapter 8 “A
corpus-driven multi-dimensional analysis of interpreted discourses in political settings”
by Bing Zou and Binhua Wang generates three factors to identify different types of polit-
ical discourse from a comparable Chinese–English corpus with four types of discourse.
The comparative approach and the quantified multi-dimensional analysis framework are
helpful for understanding the nature and the pattern of discourse in interpreting.
Part IV, consisting of Chapters 9 and 10, focuses on technology-assisted interpreting
practices. In Chapter 9 “Measuring the impact of automatic speech recognition on number
rendition in simultaneous interpreting,” Elisabetta Pisani and Claudio Fantinuoli investi-
gate the use of automatic speech recognition technologies in rendering numbers in simul-
taneous interpreting. They find a 25% decrease in error rates and conclude that automatic
speech recognition helps to reduce number memorization pressures. The findings provide
evidence for the potential of speech recognition technologies for relieving interpreters’
pressure and improving interpreting quality. This study highlights the importance, nowa-
days, with the rapid advances in interpreting related technologies, of technology-assisted
interpreting in teaching to improve students’ technological capacities.
Chapter 10 “Machine translation problems at discourse level: Pro-drop language and
large-context machine translation” by Xiaojun Zhang applies the latest findings in com-
puter studies to improve the cohesion of Chinese-English machine translation. Based on
an open-source attention-based neural machine translation model, Zhang trained a cor-
pus of one million sentence pairs to recall missing pronouns for machine translation from
a pro-drop language such as Chinese to a non-pro-drop language such as English. The
practical solutions to improve machine translation lay the foundation for furthering inter-
preting technologies.
The last three chapters comprise Part V, which deals with education. In Chapter 11
“Taxing brings benefits: The interpreter advantage in emotional regulation,” Yiguang
Liu, Hailun Huang, and Junying Liang test participants’ inhibitory control, cognitive
flexibility, and emotional regulation through the Simon task, digit switch task, and emo-
tional manipulation with music. Their findings suggest that, compared to bilinguals,
interpreters are more capable of emotional regulation. On the whole, the research design
is novel and interesting, and the findings provide a reference for aptitude testing and
training of interpreters. The attention to non-intellectual factors such as emotions can
also help expand the scope of interpreting research.
With the mixed methods of field research, questionnaires, and interviews, Chapter 12
“Flipped classrooms and translation technology teaching: A case study” by Piero Totoa
discusses the flipped classroom in translation technology teaching. It shows that success-
ful flipped classroom teaching requires students’ full preparation and that tutors can take
measures for improvement, such as designing materials suitable for online learning,
ensuring close teacher-student contact, and providing one-on-one instructions which can
offer insights into the post-COVID-19 flipped teaching in interpreting.
202 Interpreting and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2(2)

Chapter 13 “An empirical study on distance interpreter training in China: Before the
COVID-19 pandemic” by Mianjun Xu, Tianyuan Zhao, and Juntao Deng explores the
use, perceptions, influence, and problems of distance interpreter training in Chinese
universities before the COVID-19 pandemic. The research shows that the shortage of
remote teaching resources and technical support impacted distance interpreter training,
but that teachers were willing to engage in the practice. The authors’ suggestions for
promoting distance interpreter training in China include implementing incentive meas-
ures, conducting need analyses, promoting inter-collegial cooperation, and introducing
more advanced technologies. Since the pandemic has spurred the extensive use of
online interpreting education, this study can spur further comparative research to exam-
ine the changes in interpreting educators’ attitudes and demands after the normalisation
of online teaching.
This well-edited book has the following characteristics and strengths. First, it features
a broad scope of research projects, focusing on cutting-edge research. The discussions on
the social roles and values of interpreters are especially essential and impressive, high-
lighting the humanistic concern of researchers and the social significance of T&I
research. Second, by creating simulated language service contexts and advising the use
of virtual reality (VR) and other AI technologies in T&I teaching, this collection helps
interpreting students to acquire and apply skills in real-world scenarios, and shows the
researchers’ sensitivity to the integration of technological advances and pedagogy. Third,
the research designs included in this book are novel and rigorous with diversified research
tools to cross-verify the research processes and the conclusions, thereby enhancing the
reliability and validity of the research. Fourth, this collection integrates T&I with disci-
plines such as medicine, psychology, computer studies, and distance education which
can promote the interaction and intersection of different theories and the complementa-
rity of disciplines. On the whole, this book is useful to educators, learners, and research-
ers, enabling them to capture the latest findings of empirical post-structuralist T&I
studies, master its research paradigms and designs, and understand the importance of
post-structuralism in terms of interpreter education, practice, technological advances,
and social development.
There are, however, certain limitations and prospects for further improvement. First,
in addition to the current research topics, other factors such as gender studies, culture,
and ideology—which are also important elements for the vigorous development of post-
structuralist T&I studies—could have been considered. Second, the number of languages
represented, the sizes of the corpora, and the number of participants, can be further
expanded in order to generalise the findings of the studies. Third, many of the findings
are based on individually developed corpora, resulting in the research data not being
accessible to the research community. Data sharing would promote multi-perspective
research and joint academic efforts to advance empirical post-structuralist T&I studies.
Fourth, multi-modal presentations and better visualisation of research results, for exam-
ple through the use of flowcharts, could have been incorporated.
In general, this collection presents a relatively comprehensive coverage of empirical
post-structuralist T&I research. In the future, we believe that driven by the trend of post-
structuralism and relevant empirical studies, interpreting studies researchers can break
away from language-centric structuralism, thereby recognising and highlighting the his-
torical significance and social values of interpreting studies.
Book review 203

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Supported by the “Double First-Class Initiative” Fund of
Beijing Foreign Studies University (No. 2022SYLPY003).

References
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press.
Schäffner, C., & Bassnett, S. (2010). Politics, media and translation: Exploring synergies. In
C. Schäffner & S. Bassnett (Eds.), Political discourse, media and translation (pp. 1–29).
Cambridge Scholars.
Wang, Y. (2020). The sociological approaches to interpreting studies: An overview. Shanghai
Journal of Translators, 2020(4), 12–17.

Biographies
Tianyuan Zhao is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate School of Translation and
Interpretation of Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is a trainer and researcher in translation
and interpreting studies. With a doctorate in translation studies, her current research interests include
translator and interpreter training, and studies on translation and international communication.
Lin Shen is a postgraduate at the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation of Beijing
Foreign Studies University. Her current research interests include corpus translation studies and
studies on translation and international communication.