Book review
Susan Bassnett & David Johnston, eds. Debates in Translation Studies
Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2025. xii + 222 pp.

Reviewed by Yan Huang
Shanghai International Studies University
Publication history

Date received: 29 April 2025

Date accepted: 24 October 2025

Published online: 20 November 2025

Table of contents

Since its beginnings, Translation Studies (TS) has evolved through several distinct phases: the constitutive decade of the 1970s, drawing the field’s disciplinary outlines (Holmes [1972] 2000); the scaffolding decades of the 1980s and 1990s, building the theoretical framework of the discipline (e.g., Bassnett and Lefevere 1990; Bhabha 1994; Venuti 1995); and the transformative early decade of the twenty-first century, marked by globalization, methodological diversification, and technological disruption (e.g., Cronin 2013; Malmkjær 2019; Venuti 2019). As TS continues to evolve, it faces new challenges. In this context, Debates in Translation Studies, edited by Susan Bassnett and David Johnston, provides timely and much-needed contributions to ongoing discussions. Rather than offering closure, the volume revisits long-standing controversies, reframes them through a contemporary lens, and charts a course for the future of the field.

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References

Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere
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