Cordingley, Anthony and Frigau Manning, Céline, eds. (2017): Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 272 p.

The Bloomsbury Advances in Translation series is edited by Jeremy Munday, director of the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Leeds. The first volume was published in 2011, and this book represents its twelfth publication. With a focus on translation practices, processes and theory, the series has increased its pace to match the progress in Translation Studies research, with three more books having followed this one in 2017 alone. Other translation topics covered in the series include training, music and poetry, retranslation and adaptation, as well as cultural and institutional translation. The editors of Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, both Associate Professors at the Université Paris 8, bring unique backgrounds to the project. Cordingley publishes in the area of self-translation, having served as editor of a text (Cordingley 2013) in a related series called Bloomsbury Studies in Translation. Manning focuses on translation of the arts, namely theatre and opera, writing on this subject for various journals including Opera Quarterly and Nineteenth-Century Music. It is therefore not surprising that one third of the book is devoted to author-translator collaboration, and several chapters deal with translating comedies and poetry. Unfortunately, this is done at the expense of other topics that one might expect in a book about collaborative translation, such as the efficacy of various collaborative techniques, or the various roles present within a translation team. Nevertheless, valuable material is presented in relation to several aspects of collaboration, with each chapter being separately authored. The introduction establishes a clear definition of collaborative translation. It is validated as being a legitimate and positive activity, the wartime perceptions of “collaboration with the enemy” being long outdated. Not only has it existed for many centuries, but collaboration was actually the norm for both translation and writing until the Renaissance. At that time, it became a hidden activity as a result of the prevailing “myths of singularity” (p. 4) which attributed genius to a single author. The advent of copyrights only reinforced the practice of labelling a text with a single name rather than recognizing the teamwork involved in most creative endeavours. The recent interest in collaborative translation signals a return to a historic activity and an acknowledgement that it has always existed. The editors conclude that a translation can be called collaborative if there is consistent interaction throughout the process, whether simultaneous or successive. This can include the input of authors, advisors, editors, and consultants. Section 1 expounds on the visibility of collaborative translation throughout history. Belén Bistué posits that in the 15^th century, Leonardo Bruni was instrumental in suppressing its value, by the simple fact that he excluded it from his treatise about correct translation (Viti 2004). His reflection on translation is considered by some to be hypocritical since he emphasized excellence in both source and target languages, yet used Latin words to refer to Greek writings, unlike other authors of his time. Centuries later, collaborative translation made a comeback in an area to which it is well suited, perhaps even necessary: theatrical translation. Françoise Decroisette recounts how in 1993, the European Goldoni Association gathered together twenty translators to produce a shared translation of forty untranslated comedies written by Carlo Goldoni. The collaboration involved not only these translators, but also actors, directors and spectators who gave feedback to help form the finished product. During this time, a longer-running project was in progress from 1987 to 2000, involving collaborative translation of texts by Guicciardini, Savonarola and Machiavelli. Chapter authors Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini discuss how the guiding rule was that “the translated works have …