Kozin, Alexander V. (2018). Consecutive Interpreting: An Interdisciplinary Study. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 287, €103,99. ISBN 978 3319912400.

Consecutive interpreting has captured the attention of many researchers in recent decades, with the main focus points of research being aspects such as performance and quality. Yet, little has been studied about consecutive interpreting as a phenomenon and thus, this remains an underexplored area of translation and interpreting studies.

The author is an expert in several fields, including speech communication, communication studies, translation and interpreting, and stands out for his multidisciplinary background. It is, therefore, not surprising that his work reconsiders the phenomenon of consecutive interpreting from an interdisciplinary perspective. Consecutive Interpreting: An Interdisciplinary Study represents an essential publication for the development of this modality of interpreting. The author’s interdisciplinary approach brings together phenomenology and communication studies to genuinely explore consecutive interpreting and create a communication-oriented research paradigm of its own, in which intersubjectivity and sociality are favoured. The book is an appealing text with examples from different fields (including history, politics and cinema), which support the author’s perception of consecutive interpreting as a common everyday social interaction.

The book is clearly structured in six chapters and a postscript, whereby the author presents his unique perception of consecutive interpreting by questioning current perspectives. The publication starts with a section of acknowledgements, followed by an index of its contents, after which we find an introductory chapter: Consecutive Interpreting and Its Many Facets. In this first chapter, the author starts with a literature review, placing consecutive interpreting within the field of translation studies (more specifically within interpreting studies), and presents his main aim: remodelling the state of the art of consecutive interpreting by suggesting an interdisciplinary respecification of the phenomenon. He then defines consecutive interpreting, insisting on the idea that cultural mediation is a key element (as it is in written translation), allowing for social interaction between cultural others.

Chapters 2 and 3 provide the foundation for Kozin’s work. Chapter 2 presents the contributions of Husserl (1970a, 1970b) and Saussure (1959) as the key foundations for approaching translation as a communicational experience. It then explores concepts essential to the study of consecutive interpreting as a matter of experience, giving special emphasis to Jakobson’s phenomenological structuralism and his thesis of translatability (Jakobson 1971, 1987), on the one hand, and Derrida’s thesis of the untranslatable in communication (Derrida 1973, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1996), on the other. Then, Chapter 3 brings together phenomenology and linguistics and presents their phenomenological fusion. After a brief introduction to phenomenological concepts, a description of the comprehensive phenomenological method applied to study consecutive interpreting is provided.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 constitute the main contribution of this publication. Here Kozin’s study is presented, both in terms of its methodology and its main results. In Chapter 4, from a phenomenological-empirical perspective, the author analyses consecutive interpreting as a phenomenon based on talk, describing it as “translation-in-talk”. Then, in Chapter 5, he applies the proposed method to a sample of interpreting recordings to examine its communicational dimension. Based on its conversational nature, this chapter defines consecutive interpreting as “translation-in-interaction”, in which an exchange between two culturally and linguistically different parts are involved. Chapter 6 is devoted to a discussion of several ethical aspects of “translation-in-interaction”, based on cinematographic examples. The book concludes with a postscript synthesising Kozin’s main findings.

Consecutive Interpreting: An Interdisciplinary Study is a new contribution to the field of interpreting studies which is worth the read. With its innovative methodological approach, it is without any doubts a remarkable publication that leads the way to a new theoretical framework for interpreting studies. It is worth mentioning, however, that, by distinguishing it (only) from simultaneous interpreting, this book seems to view the field of consecutive interpreting as including both consecutive (monological) interpreting and its dialogical counterpart (also known as short consecutive interpreting, semi-consecutive interpreting, liaison interpreting, dialogue interpreting, etc.), but focuses mostly on the latter, as is clear from its corpus of study. One might argue that, having singularities of their own (e.g. differences in directionality, contact with speakers, working contexts or ethical issues), these interpreting modalities would benefit from being identified and studied separately. Thus, the book would have benefitted from including both modalities. Nevertheless, since the proposed model provides a generally applicable framework for the analysis of oral translation in interaction, scholars interested in either of them will appreciate the read. All things considered, this publication should attract the attention of students and scholars of different areas of knowledge, such as translation and interpreting, sociology or intercultural communication.

References

Noelia Burdeus-Domingo
École de psychologie, Université Laval
E-mail: noeliaburdeusdomingo@gmail.com