As the subtitle suggests, this book is mainly about concepts which the author thinks future professional translators should know. It provides ideas about language in general and French in particular which instructors at translation schools could usefully consider when preparing courses. Chapter 1 covers the translation-related professions and translators’ associations in Canada, as well as term banks, areas of specialization, and the competencies required of translators. A good chunk of the chapter is devoted to detailed instructions for querying the two main Canadian banks, Termium and the Grand dictionnaire terminologique, with five pages of related exercises at the end of the chapter, and for some reason eight pages listing the fields and subfields of the two banks (Appendices I to III). I found the discussion of terminology hard to follow in places (p. 42). The biographical sketch on the back cover reveals that digital applications for pedagogical purposes are Poirier’s special area of interest, though curiously he has nothing to say about translation memories. In discussing competencies, Poirier mentions that “knowledge about translation” includes knowledge of the metalanguage of translation. To this end, he discusses 127 “key concepts,” each defined in a box at relevant locations. Readers may wonder how many non-key, secondary concepts there might be! Several concepts did not strike me as terribly important, for example the notion of an interlanguage as a way of representing meaning, especially in rule-based machine translation (MT) (p. 73). Rule-based MT is not used much now, and besides, the author says (p. 29) that MT is “accessoire” in professional translation: it plays an auxiliary or perhaps incidental role. Among the concepts I did find of interest: 1) hypertraduction—a tendency by some into-French translators to avoid borrowings from English that have become well integrated into French; 2) langue-culture—different cultures are expressed in French, and this has created a conflict between Canadian French and what is sometimes called “Parisian French”—a conflict which those of us who translate into Canadian English do not face; and 3) paronymes—when these near-homonyms are in the (less well known) source language, the translator can easily err: Poirier gives the example of a translator who rendered winding streets by rues balayées par le vent [windy streets] (p. 92). Chapter 2 is about meaning. It tends to the abstract: the first example doesn’t appear until the thirteenth page. The level of detail will not be of interest to most members of the “vaste public” mentioned on the back cover as the intended readership. Does a translation critic or a user of translations, or indeed a professional translator, really need to know about semiotics and the linguistic sign as described by Saussure (p. 67-72)? The chapter starts with the concept of acception—one of the senses listed in a dictionary entry. Poirier mentions (p. 77-78) that, barring neologism, translators must not choose word senses that are not found in a dictionary. I would point out that this applies only to the target language: stretching dictionary senses of target language words is not acceptable when translating pragmatic texts (with which the book is wholly concerned), but translators do need to be able to recognize such non-dictionary usages in the source text. There is an interesting but perhaps too lengthy section (eight pages) distinguishing sens from signification, the former being a property of discourse units (sentence, paragraph, text, and corpus), the latter a property of language system units (morpheme, word, phrase, and clause). Poirier points to an interesting difference between interpretation and translation with respect to sens: interpreters must speak in the target language immediately after the …