Schwieter, John W. and Ferreira, Aline (eds) (2017). The Handbook of Translation and Cognition. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 577, $195.00/€150 (hardcover), $156.99/€135.99 (e-book). ISBN: 9781119241430, e-book. ISBN 978 1119241478.

The endeavour taken up by John W. Schwieter and Aline Ferreira together with their 30 authors (excluding from that count the editors who have authored one of the chapters) is remarkably ambitious. Naturally, it is because of its scale. Even more so, however, it is because of the challenges one is certain to come across when trying to impose some structure – in terms of conceptual or terminological consistency – on a body of research which is by nature highly multidisciplinary and dynamically growing in many directions. Bearing such definitional challenges in mind, we could say that the book shows how what could broadly be called “cognitive science” feeds into what, yet again broadly, might be labelled “Translation Studies”. With an upsurge of interest in work around those areas reflected in the impressive number of publications on the process of translation and its psychological underpinnings (e.g. Carl, Bangalore and Schaeffer 2016;Hubscher-Davidson 2017;Lacruz and Jääskeläinen 2018, and notably the journal Translation, Cognition & Behavior with its inaugural issue in 2018), Schwieter and Ferreira’s handbook is a timely and much needed compendium.  

The book comprises 30 chapters divided into 6 parts. The first part has just one chapter, a compelling introductory overview of the whole volume written by the editors.

Part II, titled “Theoretical Advances”, is primarily concerned with the translation process. The chapters vary in granularity, with some more general ones (e.g. “Translation Process Research” or “Cognition and Reception”) and some thematically narrower ones (e.g. “Directionality in Translation” and “Bilingualism in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies”), which makes it possible to arrive at a comprehensive, detailed and contextualised account of translatorial activity.

The six chapters that comprise Part III are cumulatively titled “Methodological Innovations”. While such a title could be slightly misleading because a fair proportion of the methods discussed are already well-established, this part of the book will be useful to readers with varied amount of methodological grounding and will be particularly valuable for those who wish to consolidate their current understanding of methodology in translation.

Part IV – “Translator and Workplace Characteristics” – has six chapters that address specific and very topical problem areas within the translation-cognition interface, such as machine translation, ergonomics, creativity, emotion, cognitive effort and L2 writing.

Repeating the 6-chapter composition we found in the two preceding parts, Part V deals with matters centred on the constructs and activities of “Competence, Training, and Interpreting”. With cognitive processing as a chief underlying notion across these contributions, they disentangle some terminological knots and fuse to give a meticulous account of a very important strand of translation research.

As indicated in its title, Part VI discusses research prospects. Symmetrically with Part I, it comprises markedly fewer chapters than the remaining parts. This final set of two contributions is critical for the volume as it offers a clear view of what has been accomplished and what challenges have to be faced as advances in cognitively-oriented translation studies are made.

As a general remark, largely by the very nature of their variable foci, some of the chapters throughout the handbook offer more theoretical input while others are more practically useful, for instance where they devote more space to reviewing multiple studies that have been conducted on a given issue. These succinct summaries are an exceptional asset, one that is certain to inspire new work.

On the whole, the handbook highlights the role of disciplinary cross-fertilisation as it captures the tenets, research topics, methodologies, constructs and models that make up the already vast and continually emerging field of inquiry that Schwieter and Ferreira chose to accommodate under the heading of “translation and cognition”. An achievement of the editors that has to be emphasised is bringing together and successfully coordinating the work of an impressive number of authors, each of whom is well-positioned to offer an authoritative perspective on the facets that are covered in their respective chapters.

 

References

Mikołaj Deckert
University of Łódź
E-mail: mikolaj.deckert@uni.lodz.pl