ABSTRACT
Book reviews in newspapers are complex cultural sites, providing a window onto the current interests and concerns of a society-or, at least, of its educated elite-as manifested in what gets published, what gets reviewed, and how a work is reviewed. At the same time, book reviews are one of the relatively few places where academics can address a popular audience-a good number of book reviews in newspapers are written by university professors for the common reader. In the case of translated works, book reviews represent one of the even fewer sites where lay readers are exposed to discussion of translation and the translator’s task. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to presume that reviews of translated books appearing in newspapers can tell us something about the ways in which translation and translators are imagined in a given society at a certain moment in history, raising a number of interesting questions. For example, has the rise of Translation Studies as a discipline over the last thirty years affected in any way the treatment of translation and translators in such popular venues, or is the translator’s invisibility a concern only in the ivory tower of academe? Has globalization, marked by digital connectivity and mass migration, influenced the popular understanding of translation as manifested in these newspaper reviews, not to mention the source languages of the books under review? And, in a deeper sense, what can this popular discourse about translation tell us about a society’s relationship to the foreign?
