Book review
Lieven D’hulst & Kaisa Koskinen, eds. Translating in Town: Local Translation Policies During the European 19th Century
(Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Series). London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. vi, 234 pp.

Reviewed by Yuxia Gao and Riccardo Moratto
Ocean University of China | Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
Publication history

Date received: 2 February 2021

Date accepted: 4 March 2021

Published online: 7 May 2021

Table of contents

As a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural social practice, translation is carried out in a specific time and space. In other words, translation is intrinsically spatial and geographical. The relationship between translation and geography or space is salient and has a long-standing tradition, yet it has drawn relatively little scholarly attention to date. Scholars in comparative literature were the first to focus on the relationship between translation and geography. Apter (2006) put forward the concept of ‘translation zone’ as a new field within comparative literary studies. Likewise, Italiano (2016) analyzed the transformation of literary geographical spaces between languages and explored how translation has revolutionized the way the West maps the world. Cities are major sites of language contact, attracting people from different backgrounds and speaking different idiolects. The coexistence of different languages in a limited and shared urban space is an excellent setting for the study of language variation and multilingual phenomena. Simon (2008) focused on language and translation in ‘dual cities’ and, in a subsequent publication (2012), proposed the concept of ‘the third space’. Shortly afterward, a special issue devoted to the theme “The City as Translation Zone” was published in the journal Translation Studies (Cronin and Simon 2014).

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References

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