Book review

Review of Garda Elsherif & Joanna Sobesto, eds. Positionalities of Translation Studies: On the Situatedness of Translation Research

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025. xvi + 256 pp.

The ‘cultural turn’ in Translation Studies (TS), despite having its origins in the early 1970s, was only established as a paradigm shift when Lefevere and Bassnett (1990) reconceptualized translation as cultural rewriting, prioritizing context over abstraction and power dynamics over linguistic equivalence. Prior to this, numerous scholars had introduced descriptive and empirical approaches to translational phenomena, which Lambert and Toury (1989, 6) explicitly termed “contextualization.” However, scholars aligned with cultural studies typically foregrounded the sociopolitical and ideological dimensions of translation through a more critical, activist lens to reveal its power differentials, including postcolonial conflict (e.g., Niranjana 1992), cultural hegemony (e.g., Venuti 1995), and gender inequality (e.g., Simon 1996). Hermans (1999, 157) contended that this focus on ideology and sociopolitics “leaves little room for self-relativization and critical distance toward one’s own presuppositions.” Similarly, the narratives of translation descriptivists may demonstrate implicit biases and limited self-reflexivity; no discourse, not even scientific exposition, escapes epistemic positions and assumptions (Baker 2006). Recognizing and confronting the embedded biases of TS, which are shaped by historical, geopolitical, linguistic, and gendered frameworks, remains an epistemological challenge.