There has always been an abundance of literature on the technical difficulties linked to movie translation (dubbing and subtitling), or more particularly extra-diegetic processes of translation, that is, acts of translation that take place outside the fiction. However, the aim of Cronin's book is original: to study representations of translators as characters in movies, or intra-diegetic instances of translation. The first chapter of the book presents historical and theoretical background. Large in its breadth, it spans from the silent movies era to the contemporary reception of American movies. After this introductory chapter, the book is divided into film genres (westerns, comedies, dramas, and science-fiction films) and fifteen films are analyzed: Stage coach (1939), The Alamo (1960), Dances with wolves (1990), A night at the opera (1935), The great dictator (1940), Borat (2006), Lost in translation (2003), Babel (2006), The interpreter (2005), and Star wars (the original trilogy 1977–1983 and the three prequels 1999–2005).

In the second chapter of the book (i.e. the first part of analysis), Cronin directs his attention to three seminal westerns: Stagecoach, The Alamo, and Dances with wolves. The study of translators and interpreters in these fictions permits him to “explor[e] the complex and highly charged politics of language and translation in screen treatments of the great move westwards” (xv). The third chapter is about comedies and how, in these films, the locus of humor is often in the accent and the nonnative syntax of characters. Dealing with “pseudo-language” (like the pseudo-German that Hynkel/Chaplin speaks in The great dictator) and “pseudo-translations” (in Borat, since Sacha Baron Cohen is obviously only pretending to be a foreign speaker of English), he argues that “denying the utterances of others the status of language-that-can-be-translated is to reduce them to the condition of animals” (66). The fourth chapter shows how translation tries to bridge the local to the global. For example, Cronin argues that Lost in translation reminds the spectator of the “local realities of translation on a multilingual planet” (85) and that “the real loss in translation is a loss of communicative innocence. That is, the notion that speakers of a global lingua franca can somehow expect to be readily and instantly understood across the planet” (88). The last chapter, on science-fiction films, is a slight disappointment. Dealing with alien languages and how language variety can impede democracy, it does not bring together the stimulating threads of reflection that Cronin weaved in the previous chapters.

Despite its flaws, the book is an important addition to the field. It reminds the reader that “translating the world into English makes it a safe and recognizable place with nothing to disrupt the monoglot fiction apart from the occasional untranslated residue of language shift” (69). The book is very readable and should appeal to students in translation departments as well as students of linguistics who are interested in representations of language and culture in the media.