Nowhere is Searls’s taste for conceptual conjugation more vivid than in his treatment of the venerable foreign–domestic dilemma associated with Schleiermacher and—through Lawrence Venuti—foreignizing translation. Recasting the foreign as the strange, he pairs Schleiermacher’s insistence on moving the reader toward the author with Shklovsky’s Russian-Formalist ostranenie. The gesture softens what can feel like a brittle binary and lands well in the classroom, but the shift from foreign to strange risks losing the politics of cultural difference. More broadly, the book’s constant twinning of terms—defamiliarization, affordances, “accuperation”—often demystifies jargon yet also showcases the writer’s nimbleness more than it clarifies the concepts. Readers are left wondering who the imagined non-specialist really is: an emerging translator suspicious of capital-T Theory, or an undergraduate new to the field.

The signature practical claim is that translators translate utterances, never isolated words or sentences, because context is inseparable from meaning. The assertion is incontrovertible but under-tooled. Philosophers of language supply explicit rules for carving contexts around speech-acts; literary utterances are murkier. Who is speaking? To whom? When? Searls largely trusts instinct. The result is an engaging reflective poetics but never the systematic how a reader hoping for method might crave.

That looseness extends to citation. Searls announces that he will not position his arguments “in the field”; footnotes appear only when convenient. The decision may aim to spare general readers a thicket of references, yet it undercuts both trust and usefulness. Memorable ideas—most of us found the arc image genuinely helpful—float free of provenance. Is the metaphor Searls’s own? Is it based on Merleau-Ponty’s somewhat different notion of the “intentional arc”, Merleau-Ponty’s term for our non-representational skillful responsiveness to one’s current situation, borrowed from another unmentioned predecessor, or intended as an original contribution to our understanding of our utterances? Since it lacks attribution, we hesitate to credit or teach it.

The Coda puts the central claims on trial against machine translation. Setting recent AI output beside human versions, Searls argues that a model can “comb and cull and copy and crib and collage,” but “what it can’t do is read” (216); lacking intentionality, the machine “produce[s] an arrow but not an arc,” and so misses “real readers’ assumptions and expectations” (221). The demonstration is spirited, yet the logic risks circularity: human translation is superior because reading is defined as something only humans can do.

Anyone who has prompted mid-2025 AI systems to write “more sarcastically” or to mimic a nineteenth-century middlebrow idiom knows that contemporary models already tweak diction, tone, even idiolect on request. If interpretation involves extrapolating complex patterns from data, the gulf Searls asserts may be narrowing. The human and machinic arcs could prove asymptotic, and our ability to tell them apart may be less secure than his closing paragraphs allow.

The Philosophy of Translation is at its best when Searls reads closely—sometimes his own versions, sometimes the labor of fellow translators—and lets those readings argue back at the grand claims. The arrow-and-arc dyad is memorable; the defamiliarizing reframing of foreignizing invites classroom experiment; the book’s footnotes on Bakhtin, Yasemin Yildiz, and Clemens Berger are miniature essays of erudition and charm. Yet the refusal to cite, the quick transitions from one borrowed term to the next, and the confident tone that can drift toward lecturing make the volume feel less like philosophy than like an accomplished translator thinking out loud and trusting charisma to stand in for method. Readers fluent in the scholarship may wish the charisma had been anchored more firmly; newcomers may relish the energy but wonder what, exactly, can safely be quoted the next time they translate—or teach.