Review: Ward, Martin, Eugeni, Carlo, & Walker, Callum (Eds.), 2025. Teaching Translation. Context, Modes and Technology. Routledge.

Abstract

This review is about the volume Teaching Translation. Context, Modes and Technology, edited by Martin Ward, Carlo Eugeni, and Callum Walker, which offers a timely snapshot of how translator and interpreter education is being rethought in the wake of COVID-19 and rapid technological change. The book, emerging from the 2022 APTIS conference, is organised into three parts: the relationship between the classroom and the professional world; collaborative, project-based pedagogies; and trainees’ own voices on new modes of training. The chapters cover blind spots in T&I training (Gambier), financial literacy and rate-setting (Walker & Lambert), service-learning with migrants (Belenguer Cortés), race and ethics in the classroom (Freeth), the use of computer-assisted revision tools (Musacchio & Quinci), project-based and simulated professional environments (Chen et al.; Guidarelli et al.; Penet; Ward & Tobias), and students’ perceptions of pandemic-induced online teaching and international mobility (Calvo-Ferrer; Hao).

The volume’s main strengths lie in its explicit effort to bridge academic curricula and professional realities, in its portfolio of concrete interventions that can be adapted locally, and in the space it gives to trainees’ experiences and emotions. At the same time, the collection is methodologically uneven and strongly anchored in European and Australian contexts, with less attention to Global South settings or structural questions of precarity beyond a handful of chapters. Overall, it will be of particular interest to translator trainers, programme coordinators, and researchers seeking research-informed but practical ways of integrating technology, collaboration, and critical reflection into translator education.

In what follows, I offer a structured overview of the volume and a series of critical reflections that accompany the discussion of each chapter. My aim is to situate the authors’ contributions within ongoing debates in translator education, highlighting where the volume advances current pedagogical thinking and where further empirical grounding or clarification might be beneficial.