Gambier, Yves and Ramos-Pinto, Sara (2018): Audiovisual Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 146 p.

There have been numerous publications about audiovisual translation (AVT) in recent years, notably the book by Díaz-Cintas and Nikolić (2017) and the handbook by Pérez-González (2019). And this is besides the constant publishing of special issues devoted to AVT. There is even now a journal exclusively dedicated to AVT, the Journal of Audiovisual Translation (n.d.). One has to wonder, then, whether everything has been said and done, and if this book provides more than the usual (but still relevant!) convention of the case-study approach. Gambier’s and Ramos-Pintos’ edited book was previously published as a special issue in 2016: Target 28(2). In that sense, the decision to publish that issue as a book is perhaps difficult to understand at first: there are no major changes between the special issue’s chapters and the book’s that could be identified right away, as the same chapters are included, and the content of each seems to be the same. The differences between the special issue and the book are that the former has the “book reviews” section, and that certain articles have translations, whilst the book does not. These translations are, specifically, Burchardt, Lommel, et al., and Taylor, which were translated into Chinese; Braun, and De Marco, which were translated into Hungarian. These translations, however, were not available for download on the Target website at the time of writing this review. If those translations do exist, it is a pity they were not included in the book. Overall, besides trying to reach a wider audience by publishing the special issue in book format, no specific reasoning for publishing this book is provided, and it is a pity that the special issue online actually has more content. The book, however, rapidly shows that its aim is to provide the reader with as much quintessential knowledge in as little space as possible. In the introduction, the editors place the book inside Translation Studies (TS), although they do mention the possibility that AVT may now be a field in its own right, apart from TS, because of the exponential and multidisciplinary growth it has experienced. Besides presenting an overview of the volume’s contents, the editors also explain that they aim to find a balance in the book between “pure and applied research” (5). Chapter 1, by Rosa, deals with Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and AVT. Rosa searches the Translation Studies Bibliography for keywords related to DTS and AVT, and presents the cases in which these two areas have intersected. The author also deals with various aspects related to AVT (semiotics, multimodality, corpora), but does not specifically relate them to DTS. Instead, she ends up stating that there has not been much work in AVT studies that uses DTS as a theoretical basis, and posits that despite its limitations, DTS could be used “for empirical, descriptive context-oriented fundamental research on AVT” (21). As a reader, however, I was not entirely convinced by Rosa’s argument, as the author concentrated more on why DTS has not been included much in AVT studies, instead of explaining why it should be included. Chapter 2, by Burchardt, Lommel, Bywood, Harris and Popović, concentrates on a much-needed area of research in AVT: machine translation (MT). Few articles have been written about AVT and MT, and considering how developed the area of MT already is, it is high time to read an article dealing with MT quality in an audiovisual context, involving not only researchers, but also practitioners of the art. The authors include a relevant summary of MT theory, and state that, “despite the relatively high level of technological support for the AV translator …