Book excerpt: This volume is a blend of language and literature papers highlighting linguistic functionality and topicality in poetry, novels, translation and education. It sheds light on the fictionalised reality of a strained official linguistic cohabitation in Cameroon as instantiated in present-day colonial legacy claims. It deals with issues of translation as a stylistic exercise whereby the translator has some creativity licence when rendering the source text into the target language, thus embracing Skopos theory’s view of translation as a purposeful activity determined by the target text and audience. This book also looks at an educational conception of translation as opposed to a professional translation curriculum and advocates a comprehensive needs analysis for translator education in the context of translation teaching at the Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters (ASTI) in Cameroon. The chapters also examine teacher and student discourse in the context of English Language teaching in tertiary education in China and pinpoint a dominant teacher’s voice made relevant by a Confucian didactic indexicality, which appears to be a stumbling block to any dialogic classroom discourse, despite a new curriculum promoting communicative language teaching and student-centredness. This book will appeal to academics in the fields of language and literature in general and in Cameroon and China in particular. It will also be a valuable resource for professional translators and those concerned with teaching the subject in academia as it explores a pragmatic conception of translation and envisages it, beyond professionality, as an academic field.