Book Review: Moratto,R.,& Zhang,I. A. (Eds.),Retour Interpreting: The Art of Interpreting into B

Retour interpreting has long stood at the centre of debates on directionality. Earlier discussions were shaped by two influential and partly competing traditions: the Paris School, associated with Seleskovitch and Lederer (1989), and the Russian School, represented here by Denissenko (1989). The former foregrounds reformulation and target-language expression and generally treats B–A as a preference because it minimises expression deficit, whereas the latter emphasises “comprehension bonus” and therefore regards A–B more positively. In a later contribution, Gile (1995/2009) reframed the issue in terms of cognitive effort and the allocation of limited processing capacity. More recent studies have further complicated this picture by examining directionality through systematic review, trainee interpreting performance, disfluency patterns, and accuracy in consecutive interpreting, suggesting that its effects vary across interpreting modes, tasks, and dimensions of performance (Bartłomiejczyk & Gumul, 2024; Chanprapun, 2020; Chou et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2023). It is against this broader background that Retour Interpreting: The Art of Interpreting into B makes a timely and valuable intervention. Rather than treating retour as a marginal deviation from an ideal norm, the volume approaches it as a complex practice shaped by language hierarchy, institutional demand, pedagogical conditions, and cognitive pressures. The volume is organised in three broad movements: the opening chapters revisit the conceptual and sociolinguistic debates around directionality; the middle section turns to pedagogy, institutional practice, and interpreter education; and the later chapters offer a more empirical examination of interpreting performance, process, and interpreter experience.

In Chapter 1, Lim effectively lays the conceptual groundwork for the volume by revisiting the classic debate on directionality and showing that earlier discussions of whether interpreters should work into B have become increasingly irrelevant in bilateral markets where bidirectional work is taken for granted. This chapter suggests that the quality of A–B performance is shaped less by directionality alone than by factors such as topic familiarity and source-text comprehension. By bringing professional and student perspectives into the same discussion, Lim highlights the role of experience and shifts the debate away from a simple directional hierarchy towards questions of pedagogy, training, and the sustainability of bidirectional performance.

In Chapter 2, Donovan complements this line of argument by showing how “language combination” as a professional norm can oversimplify the complexity of interpreting in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on interviews with students in Lomé and Paris, as well as on consecutive interpreting exercises undertaken by these students, the chapter highlights a persistent mismatch between official A/B classifications and interpreters’ actual histories of language acquisition and use. The results suggest that A–B is generally more demanding and less fluent than B–A, but the case for a stable “comprehension bonus” is less clearly supported. The chapter is particularly valuable in linking directionality to performance and broader issues of language hierarchy, educational policy, and professional socialisation. Together, the first two chapters shift the discussion from abstract directionality preferences to the social, linguistic, and professional conditions under which retour is practised.

If the opening chapters reframe retour as a situated professional and sociolinguistic issue, the middle section of the volume turns to the question of how such work is actually sustained, taught, and assessed. Here, the focus shifts from debating directionality in principle to examining the pedagogical, institutional, and affective conditions that make retour workable in practice.

The chapters in the middle section are especially relevant for readers interested in training and professional development. In Chapter 3, Šveda offers a useful account of how preparation routines, methods for maintaining and improving B-language speaking skills, and interpreters’ management of confidence, stress, and anxiety shape retour performance over time. Based on structured interviews with 15 professional conference interpreters working within the EU institutions and grouped by career stage, the chapter highlights the continuing importance of topic familiarity and terminology in A–B work. The chapter is especially useful for the practical implications it offers for training, suggesting ways in which younger interpreters may further strengthen preparation, manage stress and anxiety more effectively, and improve their overall performance.

In Chapter 4, Šveda and Poláček make one of the volume’s strongest contributions on the institutional dimensions of retour interpreting, showing that within the post−2004 multilingual regime of the EU, retour has become a structural necessity, particularly for the newer official languages. The chapter demonstrates the sharp asymmetry between older and newer EU languages: the former retain stronger passive coverage and greater capacity for direct interpreting into A, while the latter rely heavily on retour, especially into English. In this respect, the chapter offers concrete data on the current distribution and frequency of retour within the contemporary EU multilingual regime. It shows how linguistic hierarchy, institutional demand, and uneven passive-language coverage shape the conditions under which retour actually operates.

In Chapter 5, Brander de la Iglesia brings a noticeably innovative ethics-of-care perspective to the volume by introducing motivation and 4EA cognition—understood here as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and affective cognition—into retour interpreter education. Rather than reporting on a new empirical study, the chapter makes an important theoretical contribution that widens the discussion beyond technical competence by drawing on interpreting studies together with psychology, ethics, motivation in education, and feminist thought. In particular, it draws on care ethics associated with Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (2002), as well as on recent work on technofeminism and affect in education, to foreground the emotional, ethical, and motivational dimensions of teaching and learning into B. It also suggests that these are precisely the human dimensions that remain difficult to replicate technologically.

In Chapter 6, Tan addresses a recurring practical question in interpreter education: what exactly counts as acceptable B-language output? The chapter draws on two corpora: 30 hours of classroom recordings from Chinese-to-English into-B simultaneous interpreting classes, and open online materials on English as a B language created by practising interpreters. On this basis, it argues that B language should be judged less by idealised near-native standards than by operational criteria such as fluency, clarity, and accuracy, while tolerating certain interlingual errors as long as meaning is not distorted and such errors do not occur too frequently. This is especially useful because it gives more explicit criteria for judging B-language output than the abstract label “B language” usually allows.

The later empirical chapters further enrich the volume by moving from professional and pedagogical concerns to more fine-grained analyses of interpreting performance, process, and interpreter perceptions. In Chapter 7, He and Cheung draw on a public-hearing case to examine explicitation in Chinese-to-English legal retour interpreting, highlighting that explicitation occurs more frequently in retour than in English-to-Chinese direct interpreting and underscoring the training implications of such shifts in high-stakes legal settings. In Chapter 8, Fang examines the explicitation of attitudinal meaning through a case study of bidirectional consecutive interpreting based on two TEDx talks—one in Chinese and one in English—and a retrospective interview with a professional interpreter. The chapter shows that explicitation occurs in both directions but with different tendencies across directness, engagement, and attitudinal strength, while the interview data suggest that such shifts often arise from cognitive pressure, efforts to clarify meaning, and the interpreter’s own ideological alignment rather than from fully deliberate choices. In Chapter 9, Wang and Fang report a case study based on authentic conference interview data from a professional Chinese–English interpreter, using both accuracy analysis and measurements of ear–voice span to reconsider directionality in simultaneous interpreting. The chapter shows that the relative difficulty of each direction depends not only on language direction as such, but also on the interaction between task type, processing pressure, and the specific nature of the source discourse. In Chapter 10, Huang and Cheung examine normalisation in simultaneous interpreting into B through ensemble learning, that is, a machine-learning classification method that combines multiple models to distinguish interpreted speeches from the original English. Using a corpus that compares Chinese-to-English SI into B- with original English speeches delivered at the United Nations Security Council, the chapter suggests that the cognitive pressures of SI into B may constrain interpreters’ tendency to conform to target-language norms. By introducing this corpus-based computational approach, it also expands the methodological horizons of retour interpreting research beyond the more familiar interview- and case study–based designs. In Chapter 11, Rakhmawati and Emilia return the discussion to the level of interpreter experience by comparing professional and student interpreters in terms of perceived cognitive effort, performance, and the nature and severity of the challenges they face in retour interpreting. In this way, it makes clear that students experience greater strain and more frequent difficulties in language proficiency, task management, psychological pressure, and discourse-level control, which points to the need for more targeted training in multilingual retour settings.

Taken as a whole, the volume makes clear that retour interpreting is best understood not as a marginal deviation from a presumed norm, but as a situated practice shaped by communicative setting, institutional demand, interpreter experience, and training.

More specifically, this volume brings together professional, pedagogical, institutional, and empirical perspectives that are often treated separately, while covering both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, professional and student interpreters, and a wide range of linguistic settings, from the EU and legal interpreting to multilingual Indonesian contexts. In other words, it shows how retour is shaped by different layers of constraint and possibility. In some chapters, the emphasis falls on institutional and sociolinguistic conditions, such as unequal language status, multilingual policy, and the structural demands of the EU regime. In others, the focus shifts to pedagogy and professional development, including preparation routines, the management of stress and confidence, ethics of care, and the assessment of B-language output. In this respect, this volume reframes retour training as more than a narrowly technical issue of improving output in the B language, and instead situates it within broader questions of pedagogy, evaluation, emotional management, and professional sustainability. The later empirical chapters make the discussion more analytically specific by examining how directionality interacts with explicitation, attitudinal meaning, accuracy, normalisation, and perceived cognitive effort. By moving beyond the older assumption that the key concern is whether B–A is preferable to A–B, this book instead asks under what conditions retour works, how it is trained, what counts as acceptable B-language output, and how cognition, emotion, and institutional structure shape performance. Another strength of the collection is that it shows how several key concerns recur across otherwise diverse case studies, including topic familiarity, institutional setting, cognitive pressure, and interpreter experience. Several chapters return, in different ways, to the importance of topic familiarity, institutional setting, cognitive pressure, and interpreter experience. Others repeatedly show that directionality cannot be evaluated in the abstract, because what counts as difficulty, adequacy, or advantage depends on the specific task, discourse type, and professional context involved. This cumulative effect is one of the volume’s major achievements: even when individual chapters focus on different language pairs, methods, or settings, they collectively reinforce a more situated and less prescriptive understanding of retour interpreting. This makes the collection valuable for researchers as well as interpreter trainers and practitioners.

At the same time, some chapters draw on relatively small samples or context-specific datasets, so their findings are best read as indicative rather than broadly generalisable. In a few instances, the empirical basis is also narrower than the wider implications the discussion sometimes suggests, for example, when analysis is confined to interpreters working within a single institutional environment, or when issues such as preparation and stress in retour are explored without a direct comparison of performance across both directions. The collection might also have benefitted from a more explicit cross-chapter synthesis, so that the recurring concerns identified in individual studies could be drawn together more fully at the level of theory. These are perhaps best understood not simply as shortcomings, but as signs of a field that is still taking shape. Seen in this light, the volume’s methodological and contextual diversity becomes part of its value: instead of offering a single definitive answer, it maps out a wide range of questions, approaches, and research possibilities for future work on retour interpreting. It leaves a productive research agenda, including broader cross-institutional comparison, more systematic attention to different interpreter populations, and further study of how directionality interacts with discourse type, training conditions, and cognitive pressure across modes and language pairs. For these reasons, the volume will be of particular interest to scholars of interpreting studies, especially those working on directionality, cognition, and interpreter education. It should also prove useful to interpreter trainers and practitioners seeking a more differentiated understanding of what retour requires across different institutional, linguistic, and pedagogical settings.