Susan Pickford. Professional Translators in Nineteenth-Century France. London, Routledge, 2024, 236 p.

Susan Pickford’s recent book on the practices and professional identities of translators in 19^th-century France offers a much needed and welcome complement, not only to research on the history of translation in France and French-speaking cultures (e.g., Chevrel, D’hulst and Lombez, 2012), but also to the rich and wider literature on translators in historical contexts (such as the ground-breaking volumes edited by Delisle and Woodsworth, 1995; Delisle, 1999, 2002), as well as the more sociohistorical and archival-based approaches to the lives and careers of translators (Simeoni, 1995; Paloposki, 2017, to name but two). Using archival records of key French publishers in the period, as well as institutional records and translators’ own commentaries and writings, the book provides an in-depth examination of translators’ working and self-reflective practices. It outlines the sociocultural, legal, and economic factors that shaped the development of the professional translation industry from the aftermath of the French Revolution through to World War I—a period that was marked by significant changes in the print, bookselling, and publishing industries, along with an increase in literacy and demand for books. Highlighting the growing recognition of translators (the “translatorial turn”) as key players in the international circulation of texts, the author discusses the practice of French-language translators across publishing, commerce, and government during that period. One notable merit of the work is its determination to illuminate the work of lesser-known translators rather than discussing well-known figures. One reason for this is that 19^th-century translators who are remembered today are usually (with some exceptions) renowned authors who approached translation more as “amateurs”—not in the sense that they were not compensated (on the contrary) or that the quality was substandard, but because their translations were part of their literary career rather than their main focus and profession (Charles Baudelaire and his translations from Edgar Allan Poe, to name but one example in this context). Consequently, the work highlights translators’ collective contributions and offers a new perspective on “translator history from below.” Such endeavour facilitates a more comprehensive and diverse view of the position(s) and role of translators in the literary marketplace and in cross-cultural knowledge exchange. Furthermore, the archive-based approach of the microhistory “from below” helps shed additional light on wider aspects of book history by unveiling aspects of authorship and publishing that would otherwise be only presumed and therefore potentially inaccurate if they are only inferred from well-known author-publisher transactions. The book is, therefore, timely and relevant to the expanding body of research (highlighted by Milan, 2021) which predominantly draws on archival materials and agent-grounded approaches, and which indicates two noticeable developments in the field of translation history—the “archival turn” and the “professional turn.” The boundaries between “amateur” and “professional” are inevitably quite fuzzy, as Pickford underlines, and as previously noted by Margaret Lesser (2006). In some way, these blurred lines connect to what Reine Meylaerts describes as the “multipositionality” of literary translators, which “relates to their multiple lives (as a professional teacher, journalist, civil servant, etc. and as a writer, critic, translator, self-translator, editor, etc.) and to their plural and variable socialisation in a variety of social and cultural contexts” (2013, p. 109). Nevertheless, the 19^th century is certainly an interesting period for examining aspects in the professionalization of translators considering the various developments in the publishing industry and print cultures, the professionalization of authorship, the internationalization of the book trade, and the related and progressive development of international copyright legislation. In the introductory remarks as well as in the first chapters—especially chapters 1 (“The Emergence of a Mass Market for Translation”), 2 (“Tracing an Emergent Discourse …

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