In recent times, translator education has, in general, tried to stay away from SLA. One of the reasons for this lies in the prescriptivist belief that students should have acquired their languages by the time they start their translation education. Yet the reality is that current translation practice throughout the world includes many cases of incomplete language acquisition, especially in immigrant communities, and that translation into a second language is common (Campbell, 1998; McAlester, 1992; Newmark, 1988). Therefore, this volume is, in principle, a relevant publication for the field of SLA.

González Davies presents a student-centered, interactive approach to translator training by providing a substantial collection of activities, tasks, and projects. The goal of the book is to offer a variety of activities that respect multiple learning styles and various approaches to translation teaching. It grows out of the observation that, traditionally, pedagogy and psychology have been left out of publications on translator training. The author attempts to remedy such a state of affairs by taking into account the insights of research in pedagogy and psychology regarding motivation, participation, and diversity of learning styles. The first part of the book presents the pedagogical principles for the proposed approach as well as classroom dynamics, procedures (activities, tasks, projects), and a method of evaluation based on the author's experience. In the second chapter of Part 1, the author addresses teacher and student roles, student types, student awareness, and attitude at different developmental points. Part 2 focuses on translation itself. Numerous activities are included, grouped around different approaches to translation: history of translation, linguistics, and cultural studies. The activities of chapter 2 revolve around competence areas: linguistic skills (e.g., collocations, false friends, low-level lexical and syntactic transfer, synonyms, verb forms), encyclopedic skills, and transference skills. Mental skills, resourcing skills, and decision-making skills constitute the focus of attention among transference skills.

González Davies states in the introduction that “this volume has been conceived as an idea book that suggests activities, tasks, and projects” (p. 7) and then later that “the main aim was to provide teaching ideas that could be adapted to different teaching environments” (p. 225). The volume succeeds in achieving these aims. In fact, this reviewer knows of no other recent publication that offers the reader such an array of activities that are both entertaining and engaging and that are bound to improve student motivation and involvement in the learning process. The book is thus in consonance with its stated goal of applying relevant research in pedagogy and psychology to translator training, given that such research “points to an improvement of the student's competence and performance if the diversity of learning and teaching styles is respected” (p. 2). The type of group work and cooperative learning exemplified in the activities is also supported by findings in psychology and education. In sum, the activities, tasks, and projects that constitute the bulk of this book can be said to respond to research findings in education and psychology. Additionally, many of these activities are language-learning exercises that could be used in language classes, therefore demonstrating (contra popular belief) that SLA is relevant to translator training and vice versa.

One would have wished, however, that the application of relevant research to translator training would not have stopped with psychology and education, and that findings in other disciplines (e.g., SLA, discourse analysis, bilingualism, acquisition of translation competence, reading research) would have guided the selection, aims, and design of the activities and tasks. To illustrate, in the section on linguistic skills (Part 2), exercises on lexical and phrase-level syntactic constituents (collocations, synonyms, verb forms, articles) are included rather than discourse level ones (features of written discourse, specific genres, etc.). No justification is given for this decision. The same could be said about activities in other sections of the book. One also wonders whether there is a systematic approach to the selection of the aims assigned to each activity, given that at times it is difficult to see why a particular activity belongs in one section rather than another. Additional evidence of a somewhat inconsistent application of research is the author's claim that there is no definite approach to teaching translation (p. 226), which is clearly based more on personal belief than on inconclusive research findings. Finally, there is a scarcity of relevant references in SLA and translation teaching.

In summary, despite its weaknesses, this book contains many activities that will be an invaluable source of ideas for the translation and language teacher.