What makes a good book review on translation studies? An interview with Reviews Editor Anna Strowe

ABSTRACT

This interview was conducted face-to-face at the University of Manchester. The focus of the interview between Hua Tan and Dr. Anna Strowe, the Book Reviews Editor for Translation Studies, was on how to write good academic book reviews, especially for translation studies. Academic book reviews play an important role in academic communication. They introduce and evaluate newly published academic works and provide a forum for academics to evaluate each other’s research. In the eyes of many scholars, book reviews are easy to write and publish. Yet, a good academic book review is not that easy to write. Dr. Anna Strowe held that academic book reviews are not confined to fixed structures, but vary from text to text and reviewer to reviewer. In her opinion, the evaluation of the book reviewed or the critical comment on it, or in a different term, the intellectual engagement, is the most important for a good book review. She suggested that young scholars build up their networks and read many book reviews first before starting to write one.

KEYWORDS:

• Book reviews
• translation studies
• intellectual engagement
• Translation Studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2023M730702); the Center for Translation Studies of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (Grant No. CTS202010); the Humanities and Social Sciences Funds of Department of Education of Hubei Province (Grant No. 20G012); the Self-determined research funds of CCNU from the colleges’ basic research and operation of MOE (Grant No. CCNU20TD008).

Notes on contributors

Hua Tan

Hua Tan, is a Postdoc at College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, and a lecturer of the School of Foreign Language, Central China Normal University. His research areas include studies of CTS (Corpus-based Translation Studies), stylometry, and digital humanities. TAN Hua, lecturer, Ph.D., academic visitor at The University of Manchester during Dec. 2017 and Dec. 2018, research areas include studies of CTS (Corpus-based Translation Studies), literary translation, the history of translation theories, stylometry.