Following the first successful edition, Basil Hatim and Jeremy Munday have revised and updated Translation quite extensively for its second edition. It was published within the series Routledge Applied Linguistics, which offers readers comprehensive resource materials for their advanced study in some core fields of English language and Applied Linguistics. The series, including this book, is edited in a bottom-up and reader-friendly manner to allow researchers to explore the relevant fields according to their own stage of studying. It is elaborately designed and divided into three parallel and progressive sections, which are Section A: Introduction, Section B: Extension and Section C: Exploration. Each section consists of 14 units on a given topic so that the book can be read either in a linear way, which means it can be read from the beginning until the end, or in a thematic way, which means readers can choose only the topics that appeal to them. After introducing the topics in Section A, the authors carefully select some excerpts from the seminal works in Translation Studies in Section B. The thematic order may be of great use for researchers as Section C usually reviews the content in Sections A and B of the same unit and also develops the relevant topics for further research. This article will review the book according to the thematic order, briefly summarise the main ideas and analyse its advantages and aspects that warrant improvement.

As its title “What is Translation?” implies, Unit 1 tries to discuss the fundamental conceptions of translation and Translation Studies through presenting Jakobson’s term “interlingual translation” and Holmes’s mapping of the field of Translation Studies respectively. It reveals that this field mainly deals with the varied phenomena of the process, product and function/context of translation, though it remains tentative as to whether there are any universals, or a general theory of translation for different kinds of translation texts or conditions. It finds that research into translation can be interdisciplinary, encompassing fields such as science, literature and politics, etc. Tracing the origin of the classical dichotomy in translation between the form and content of a text, which has led to some bi-polar “Translation Strategies” such as “literal” and “free,” “domestication” and “foreignisation,” Unit 2 argues that, at the least, translation strategies should not be regarded as extremes, but as a cline so that further research can be carried out on the elements, both within and outside the text, that influence the translation strategies and functions. Unit 3 touches upon an ambiguous area, or “The Unit of Translation,” the definition of which, in fact, has no full agreement due to the complexity of the translation process. It generally refers to the linguistic unit that the translator employs while translating. It can range from a word, clause or sentence to even higher levels such as text and intertextual levels. With the development of technical tools, empirical research in this area can be conducted from the perspective of the translator’s cognitive process. Following up the “Unit of Translation,” Unit 4 attempts to describe “Translation Shifts,” which is also a fuzzy concept to some extent. They are the small linguistic changes taking place between source and target texts. As has been mentioned above, since an evaluation of the unit of translation is required, the decision about whether a shift has taken place during translation will inevitably be subjective. Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958/1995) categorisation of shifts between English and French remains a classical model. Although the analysis of translation shifts may ignore the bigger picture of discourse and the cultural context of translation, Hatim and Munday believe that it can still be a first step in the evaluation of translation (p. 246). Having discussed the shifts of meaning in translation, Unit 5, “The Analysis of Meaning,” tries to solve the question as to how to determine whether the source text meaning has been transferred into the target text. It is assumed that meaning can be observable, measurable and transferable in translation. Based on the linguistic field of semantics, or the study of meaning in language, the authors introduce some methods of scientific analysis such as the disambiguation of referential meaning through the analysis of semantic structure and componential analysis, as well as the gauging of connotative meaning using clines. However, given that there is ambiguity in meaning and that there can never be absolute correspondence between languages, Unit 6, entitled “Dynamic Equivalence and the Receptor of the Message” explores how to achieve an equivalent effect in the translation. Nida’s work on dynamic equivalence, which was quite influential in Translation Studies, is thoroughly discussed, but it is also pointed out that the equivalent effect is elusive in nature. The target reader’s response, which the dynamic equivalence elicits, can never be identical to the reader’s response, which the source text elicits. We need to bear in mind that dynamic and formal equivalence can be seen as points on a cline. They are not absolute techniques but general orientations.

Unit 7, “Textual Pragmatics and Equivalence,” is a continuous discussion of some previous units. As explained in Unit 3, it is usually not the word that is the unit of translation but rather the text in communication. When making decisions, translators are motivated by factors such as their aesthetics, cognition and knowledge, and commission, etc. The words that the translators translate should be seen as the building blocks of larger texts all the time. Only by taking the larger textual features into consideration can the translations achieve a broader sense of equivalence. Having finished dealing with text-based translation, the book shifts its focus from texts to mental processes, namely, Unit 8 “Translation and Relevance.” The relevance model argues for a cognitive-linguistic approach to analysing translation and insists on the role of inferencing that hearers, readers or translators engage in during the process. The authors believe that the relevance model represents a corrective to some theories mentioned earlier in the book, such as those related to semantics and pragmatics. It has certainly inspired much research on the translation process. The following units concern some macro-structures of a text during translation. Unit 9, “Text Type in Translation,” copes with the debate as to whether classifying texts is feasible or practical for translators. It reveals that text typologies, together with text purpose and function, are still of great use for translators in their efforts to determine the appropriate equivalence levels when they are assigned a particular translation work. Drawing on systemic-functional linguistics, Unit 10, “Text Register in Translation,” is concerned with context of situation, or the way language generally varies along with different conditions. The linguistic variation can reflect a language user’s geographical, historical and social status. The register variation can also be seen from a language use perspective. This is then applied to the translation quality assessment by judging the adequacy of a translation strategy for a specific kind of text. However, the choice of a translation strategy is related to the entire context of culture within which texts and their translation are produced. So, Unit 11, “Text, Genre and Discourse Shifts in Translation,” treats texts as reflections of the expression of a series of socio-cultural meanings. This is an attempt to supplement the translation shift model (Unit 4) by taking into account the bigger picture. Texts, genres and discourses are frames under which we deal with words. The context of culture thus requires us to examine translation shifts from points of view such as diverse rhetorical purposes, modes of speaking and writing, and attitudes towards aspects of socio-cultural life.

The next two units further the discussion of socio-cultural factors that affect translation. In Unit 12, “Agents of Power in Translation,” the authors claim that discourse can express some attitude towards areas of socio-cultural practice. In some cases, the statements in discourse become dominant and enjoy power, which would shape a particular vision of reality. Translation is no exception in this sense. It can be exercised by using language to include or exclude a particular kind of reader, a certain system of values, a set of beliefs or an entire culture. So, in Cultural Studies, translation does not stick to the notion of equivalence or insistence on the dominance of the original work any longer. Researchers need to discover and describe the norms and constraints which influence the production and reception of translations and which can explain these kinds of re-writing activities. Unit 13 singles out one of the most important power structures for analysis, namely, “Ideology and Translation.” Ideology here refers to the “tacit assumptions, beliefs and value systems which are shared collectively by social groups” (Hatim and Mason 1997: 114). This unit centres on some of the interdisciplinary approaches between translation and Cultural Studies, including Gender Studies and Postcolonialism. In addition to linguistic and textural context, it has expanded the discussion of the context of translation. The book ends up with the final unit “Translation in the Digital Era.” It reflects on the relationship between translation and new technologies. Changing the title from “Translation in the Information Technology Era” in the first edition, the authors want to show some future possibilities of Translation Studies. They examine areas such as fully and semi-automated Machine Translation, translation memory and terminology management tools and corpus-linguistic tools, which refer to large amounts of naturally occurring language that can be searched quickly and accurately and used for contrastive analysis of language and universal features of translation, etc.

Compared to the first edition, this book is better organised, since it combines the development of Translation Studies with their state-of-the-art research orientations. For instance, when talking about Machine Translation, the authors point out that the latest technological development for data-driven Machine Translation is Neural Machine Translation (NMT) (Luong et al. 2015). Depending on artificial neural networks, NMT systems can study alignments and translations from large parallel corpora. Its advantage is that its systems can deal with long-distance dependencies more successfully and keep global structural coherence on the sentence level. For language combinations with large corpora, NMT can reach the quality of MT, which will need little post-editing for publication tasks and save much time and costs in the translation workflow. The contents of the book are compiled with both some general introductions and detailed descriptions. Unit 12 briefly introduces different types of power within the research of translation and in the next unit attention is paid exclusively to ideology in translation, which can even help advance a country’s modernisation agenda (Lung 2016: 50). This arrangement highlights the emphasis of research in this particular area. Besides, this book is full of lively translation examples spanning from multilingual waring notices on some international trains to tourist brochures originating in languages such as French, Russian and Arabic. The wide coverage of interactive content entertains readers of different language backgrounds. However, despite these merits, some aspects can be improved. Firstly, the arrangement of units could be reconsidered. For example, Unit 4 focuses on the discussion of translation shifts, which is actually based on the analysis of meaning (Unit 5). It might be better to exchange the order of these two units. Also, Unit 8, “Translation and Relevance,” which advocates a cognitive-linguistic approach to translation, upsets the series of textual approaches to translation from Unit 7 to Unit 11. It also seems to be underexplored and can be rearranged in a more logical way. Secondly, as both authors seem to prefer linguistic approaches for translation analysis, it is unavoidable that most of the units in this book analyse translation under linguistic paradigms. There are only two units dealing with cultural approaches, i.e., Units 12 and 13, which, however, have become more and more popular in Translation Studies. Future editions should consider revising this imbalance of different approaches. Last, but not least, reference material appears to occupy too much space in this book and some theories are a bit too old.

Linguistics has always been an important discipline for the development of Translation Studies. Overall, this book is an important resource book for both translation students and researchers. Hopefully, it will spur more interests in the linguistic approaches to translation.