This edited book grew out of the 23rd Meeting of the European Network “Translation as a means of intercultural communication” [La Traduction comme moyen de communication interculturelle], which brings together researchers from two Polish and two French universities: Jagiellonian University Krakow, Wrocław University, Université de Haute-Alsace, and Université de Lille. The network’s international conference on “Translating Popular Fiction and Science” [Traduire la littérature grand public et la vulgarisation] was held on 4-5 April 2019 in Mulhouse, France and the authors of all but one of the book’s sixteen chapters appeared on the conference’s program. Fourteen chapters are in French with two in English, although most chapters have an abstract in both languages. The introduction in French by Martina Della Casa, Enrico Monti, and Tatiana Musinova (the book’s three editors and the conference’s three-member organizing committee) explains that the genres of popular fiction and popular science have a wide and heterogenous readership but lack academic recognition both in their original language and in translation. Popular science texts are recognized as crucial for disseminating research outside expert circles, improving accessibility to knowledge and testable hypotheses, and countering public mistrust. Popular fiction shares this goal of wide accessibility but does not stem from specialized knowledge. (In defining popular fiction, this volume uses as a criterion the work’s public success, thereby including literary fiction that happened to reach a wide audience.) A parallel is also drawn between science communication via popular science texts and the act of translating, which was historically used to render classical texts accessible. They close the introduction with a rallying call of “respect” for the disparaged work of the authors and translators of popular fiction and popular science and for readers of these texts. At the end of the book, these three authors offer a four-page selected bibliography on the translation of popular fiction and popular science. Both essays in the first section, “Theoretical approaches” [Approches théoriques], explore the relationship between translation and popularisation to make information accessible to a broader audience, highlight the importance of the translator understanding source material, and discuss implications for educating translators. Writing in French, Nicolas Froeliger sidesteps this volume’s focus on popular texts to study the translation of technical financial texts from English into French by using popularization as a cognitive translation model, and warns against being seduced by “the picturesque,” or translation as magical thinking relying blindly on concordancers. He explores how translators access and reformulate specialized knowledge for a target audience and asks whether a translated technical text is thereby popularized. Writing in English, Gary Massey investigates how translations of popular science impact target culture discourses and emphasizes the need to understand cognitive processes to gain insights into translation products, showing that it is not enough to simply translate words without understanding the underlying concepts. Massey advocates for a combined approach of product-oriented and process-oriented research involving analyzing translation products alongside observing translators’ cognitive processes to understand decision-making. The second section, “Historical approaches” [Approches historiques], includes four essays in French, all of which investigate the role and impact of translation within a specific cultural context and explore how translations can shape understanding, disseminate ideas, and reflect cultural values. Muguraş Constantinescu studies translations into Romanian of literary fiction that has reached a wide audience by (mostly French) authors including Proust, Flaubert, and Maupassant but also Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen for mass-market collections curated for a newspaper and a supermarket, showing how paratexts are used to attract a broad readership. Paratext is also relevant to Justyna Łukaszewicz’s comparison of the Polish and French translations …
