Book review
Review of Douglas Robinson. A Zombie Theory of Translation: Or, What is a “Revenant” Translation?
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 71 pp.

Reviewed by Yang Xu

Lanzhou University

Publication history

Date received: 8 April 2026

Date accepted: 3 May 2026

Published online: 19 May 2026

Table of contents

Note
Funding
References
Address for correspondence

Douglas Robinson’s A Zombie Theory of Translation is a profoundly unsettling book. The unease it provokes does not come merely from its graphic depictions of violence and death — although the fictional narrative woven through it, Six Million Shylocks: A Zombie Memoir, is certainly replete with meat cleavers splitting skulls and zombies devouring brains. Rather, the disturbance lies in how the book upends the most basic assumptions of Translation Studies. In Robinson’s account, translation is no longer the transmission of meaning, the mediation between cultures, or the rebirth of a text. It is the death of the source text and its return as a revenant — a body without a soul, a walking corpse. And this, he insists, is translation’s true nature.

References

Batchelor, Kathryn

2023 “Re-Reading Jacques Derrida’s ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ (What is a ‘relevant’ translation?).” The Translator 29 (1): 1–16.

Benjamin, Walter

2000 “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens [orig. Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers ].” Translated by Harry Zohn. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 15–25. London: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques

2001 “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation? [orig. Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’? ].” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27 (2): 174–200.

Ervas, Francesca

2023 Translation in Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gomel, Elana

2003 Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Levine, Michael G.

2022 “Translation, Transference, Trouvaille: Derrida’s ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’” Diacritics 50 (3): 4–28.

Newmark, Peter

1988 A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice Hall.

Nida, Eugene A.

1964 Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill.

Shakespeare, William

2018 The Merchant of Venice. Edited by M. M. Mahood. 3rd ed. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book reviewReview of Douglas Robinson. A Zombie Theory of Translation: Or, What is a “Revenant” Translation? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 71 pp.

References

Book review
Review of Douglas Robinson. A Zombie Theory of Translation: Or, What is a “Revenant” Translation?
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 71 pp.