<i> Histoire des traductions en langue française, <scp>xx</scp> ^e siècle: 1914–2000 </i> . Sous la direction de <scp>Bernard Banoun</scp> , <scp>Isabelle Poulin</scp> et <scp>Yves Chevrel</scp> <i> Histoire des traductions en langue française, <scp>xx</scp> ^e siècle: 1914–2000 </i> . Sous la direction de BanounBernard, PoulinIsabelle et ChevrelYves. Paris: Verdier, 2019. 1920 pp., ill.

This is the fourth volume of the Histoire des traductions en langue française (HTLF). The first, covering the nineteenth century, was published in 2012; further volumes covering the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries followed in 2014 and 2016. Altogether the project represents an astounding labour of scholarship and international collaboration, completed over a relatively short time period. The HTLF sets itself the ambitious goal of observing the role played by translations in all areas of intellectual enquiry. Around 40 per cent of the volume under review is devoted to literary translation, and a further 40 per cent is shared between other areas, such as opera, cinema, religion, philosophy, history, anthropology, and the sciences. The remainder of the volume is taken up with contextualizing essays by leading translation theorists, and includes a history of traductologie, a field of research which — like translation studies in the UK — has come into its own since the 1970s. These rough percentages give an indication of the balance and scope of the volume, and the range of readers for whom it will no doubt become a vital resource. Far from being an enumeration of translated publications, the HTLF is a series of carefully constructed historical narratives, based on a critical approach to primary sources, and alert to the silences and biases within those narratives. In the chapter on the sciences, for example, the authors sketch out broad trajectories of translation activity against the backdrop of changing trends in language use in scientific publications, but note that any account that is based on written documents and bibliographic research overlooks the significance of what they term ‘invisible’ translation activity. By this they mean translations which circulate in unpublished form, or as annexes to original works, or, towards the end of the century, via simultaneous interpretation at major international conferences. Throughout the volume, there is a concern to shine a light on translators, ‘trop longtemps invisible’ (p. 7). Thus one of the contextualizing chapters is devoted to the translation profession and translator education; there is an index of translators as well as an index of authors; feature boxes offer biographical accounts of individual translators such as Vladimir Nabokov (pp. 815–16); names of translators are systematically included in the historical accounts, and are supplemented on occasion with further details about their other publications or activities. Considerable attention is also given to the crucial role played by patrons and editors in determining translation selection. Geographically, the focus of the volume is on the major francophone spaces of the West — France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland. Temporally, the volume ends, as its title indicates, in the year 2000; only one of the chapters (on feminism and gender studies) extends in-depth discussion into the early decades of the twenty-first century. From the perspective of today’s technology-imbued world, there is already a sense on reading this ‘final’ HTLF volume (p. 7) that a history of the first decades of the twenty-first century needs to follow not long behind.

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