https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3698-8706
Lifestyle Politics in Translation: The Shaping and Re-Shaping of Ideological Discourse by M. Cristina Caimotto and Rachele Raus explores the impact of translation processes on society and personal lifestyle issues, as well as how they influence and are influenced by ideological discourse. By examining writings written by political actors, such as national governments and international organisations, as well as their translations, this volume takes a novel perspective on the study of lifestyle politics, which describes the tendency to politicise people's everyday life choices. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to incorporate research from political science, economics, linguistics, and translation studies. In addition, the writers highlight the processes of depoliticisation and marketisation that globalised discourse undergoes, which impact people's identities.
The book under review is informative, with seven chapters in three parts (hybridisation, threats, and well-being) dealing with six realms (gender, artificial intelligence, terrorism, climate change, urban mobility, and food), which aims to show how hegemonic discourse shapes identities and lifestyles. The introductory part introduces the notion of “lifestyle politics”, which describes the tendency to politicise people's everyday choices. Furthermore, this part also explains how international organisations produce institutional texts on topics concerning and influencing the public debate and personal sphere.
The first part of this volume opens the book by observing hybridisation. Chapter two focuses on texts about gender and intersectionality, which examines the case of the commodification of women and the dominant neoliberal discourse. It further explores two paradigms of the EU's gender discourse: first, the debate on prostitution and the body as a commodity, which pits proponents of regulation against opponents and results in a critique of patriarchy; second, the framing of women and policies against intersectional discrimination. The hybridisation theme in chapter three deals with the public policy sectors of robots and artificial intelligence. It explains the development of an economic narrative shared by the English and French versions of the documents published by the EU Parliament and Commission (2017–2019). The narrative validates economic practices which result in “AI made in Europe.” Although the AI presented in the French documents is fundamentally optimistic, the effects of translation (forced revelations and ideological transformations) reveal that it assumes a somewhat different person who rejects the lifestyle politics outlined in the discourse.
Chapters four and five belong to the second part of the current volume and they share the same theme-threats. Chapter four investigates the topic of terrorism as it was discussed globally following the 9/11 attacks and the 2004 attacks in Europe, highlighting concerns about the contribution these events made to the idea of the European “way of life”. Using the French and English versions of the Paris Agreement, chapter five examines the threat posed by the climate issue and demonstrates the hegemonic growth narrative's influence.
The book's third section is devoted to well-being and the consequences of mobility for health. In chapter six, the authors look at the hegemonic ideology and how it translated to affect urban mobility in a European Green Paper. Chapter seven looks into two institutional documents (“Fruit and Vegetables for Health” report and WHO's Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity, and Health) which introduce the changes that later gave rise to the numerous healthy eating campaigns all around the world while also investigating case studies that centre on food.
The last part of the conclusion draws attention to the linkages across the six areas that the volume examines, highlighting how hegemonic discourse impacts identities and lifestyles. Through programmes of meaning connected to lifestyle politics that aim to intrude in citizens’ private lives by limiting their agency while promoting a narrative of empowerment, a new image of individuals is shown through the case studies in this book. The way that the individual is conceptualised differently in the French and English publications under study seems to act as a filter to prevent the spread of the meaning-laden lifestyle programme associated with surveillance capitalism.
One merit of the book is that the authors concentrate on the hegemonic lifestyle ideology—a salient aspect of the current neoliberal order—rather than searching for ideological influences by the translator and noting its presence in both the English and the French versions of the same document. Another strength of the book is that the authors consider translation by focusing on literature written in English and French. As a result, they examine translation processes in situations where it is possible to distinguish between the source and target texts and in less clear situations.
Despite the advantages above, nevertheless, the book also suffers from drawbacks. The current volume does not stress that changes in discourse will always be changes concerning the hegemonic western discourse. The authors have presented that even in the hybridisation cases examined in part one, words and/or discourses that can supposedly undermine Western dichotomies—such as the concepts of “gender” and “intersectionality” in parts two and three and the human-machine hybridisation and the ensuing personification of the machine or the human hybridisation—only ostensibly do so. They are made clear as methods for eliminating the private-public divide to lessen human agency or, to put it another way, to get surveillance.
Taken altogether, Lifestyle Politics in Translation: The Shaping and Re-Shaping of Ideological Discourse is a book that deserves to be well-read since it offers a novel approach to examining political discourses and their interdisciplinarity. Moreover, this volume also contributes to the emerging literature on translation studies, political studies, and discourse analysis. As such, the book is recommended to students and scholars interested in translation studies, (critical) discourse analysis, and political science.