Teaching Translation. Programs, Courses, Pedagogies ed. by Lawrence Venuti (review)

This volume of twenty-six essays surveys the terrain of Translation Studies that Lawrence Venuti began to cultivate with the 1995 publication of his seminal The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. It has been more than two decades since Venuti described his thinking about the "translator's weird self-annhilation" and how translation could reconfigure the study of world literature (8). The essays he has now gathered in the volume under review attest to the fact that the field has "arrived." The contributions provide a kind of tool kit for curricular development, program building, and thinking about pedagogy in what is now a (capitalized) discipline of Translation Studies. In Venuti's words, they offer "exemplary models that can be replicated or adapted in other institutions" (13).

The book is divided into four sections with an editor's introduction that gives an overview of the past and present state of Translation Studies (largely in the United States). It ends with a section called "Resources" with two essays on pedagogical approaches and specific information on textbooks. The volume concludes with a useful bibliography. The first section of the book describes models for certificate and degree programs in translation with a strong emphasis on the workings of specific courses that are embedded in various undergraduate and graduate settings: a Department of World Languages and Cultures, a Department of Comparative Literature, an Institute for Applied Linguistics, an MFA and a doctoral program. These well-written case studies provide information on the structure of the individual programs, but do not suggest overt connections between them. Instead, and despite the rich descriptions, these curricular structures seem isolated in discrete institutional berths. The examples in the second section give models for courses and a kind of "lessons learned" evaluation of how students dealt with course material and what they discovered in the process. These nine essays will prove useful for anyone interested in developing courses in translation in specific disciplinary contexts. That said, some readers may find the specifics repetitive and even tedious, also because the detailed descriptions of the unfolding of particular courses do not necessarily lead to transferable models. Missing here are stronger critical arguments for offering these courses in the first place. The contributions do, however, suggest some generative questions about how the study of translation relates to larger curricular structures and, specifically, to the study of languages (more on that below). The third section, "Studying Translation Theory, History and Practice," provides broader reflections on the question as to why we should adopt these approaches. Here we get a sense of what Venuti promises his reader early on, namely that "the very notion of what constitutes translation theory" will be "redefined in the movement" between the sections of the book (14). The reader has to work a bit too much to tease out that theoretical framework and the way in which it works to link theory and praxis and, if she or he wants to, can be content with descriptions of courses and syllabi.

There are, then, a number of important questions that the contributors largely avoid. How, as Venuti puts it, can the teaching of translation research and practice improve now that it has "achieved such stability as might resist change in order to maintain a viable institutional position" (2)? Is Translation Studies simply a response to a lack of course offerings beyond what Michelle Hartman, in an essay on teaching translation and Modern Arabic Literature, calls—bit too easily—"white, Euro-North American traditions" (118)? Is the field merely a part of what Jane O. Newman describes, in an essay on "Theory in a Comparative Literature Department," as the self-fashioning of Comparative Literature and its sometimes essentializing accounting of the languages (137)? The essays in the third section will certainly interest the practitioner, even though they often repeat the case study pattern of the second section or seem largely concerned with rationalizing their own institutional positions. An exception is...