Book review: Empirical Studies of Translation and Interpreting: The Post-Structuralist Approach

In the 1970s, a growing body of post-structuralist research focused on the subjective initiative of practitioners and the game of power relations in society. Meanwhile, the empirical 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 relationship between T&I practice and society, focusing on the social influence and roles of interpreters. Chapter 1 “Biopolitics, complicity, and community in domestic abuse support 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.

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 clinical 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 difficulty on the allocation of cognitive resources between translating and consultation: An eye-tracking and screen-recording study” by Yixiao Cui and Binghan Zheng uses readability indices, cognitive load surveys, and fixation duration data to determine the perceived translation difficulty and analyse students’ consultation during the translation processes. The measurement of difficulty can draw the attention of interpreting researchers 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-translation 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 discourse analysis,” Fei Gao and Binhua Wang use systematic functional linguistics to analyse 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 subtitling 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 translations 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 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 reception 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 political 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 investigate the use of automatic speech recognition technologies in rendering numbers in simultaneous 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, nowadays, 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 computer studies to improve the cohesion of Chinese-English machine translation. Based on an open-source attention-based neural machine translation model, Zhang trained a corpus 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 interpreting 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 emotional 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 successful 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.

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 measures, 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 examine 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, highlighting 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 disciplines such as medicine, psychology, computer studies, and distance education which can promote the interaction and intersection of different theories and the complementarity of disciplines. On the whole, this book is useful to educators, learners, and researchers, 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 example 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 historical significance and social values of interpreting studies.