Translation And Global Spaces Of Power

This book focuses on the role of translation in a globalising world. It presents a series of case studies that explore the ways in which translation is subject to ideology and power play across diverging domains and genres. Broadly based on a discussion of 'translation and the economies of power', the chapters examine an array of contextual and textual factors, ranging from global, regional and institutional power relations to the linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical implications of translation decisions. The book maps the multiple ways in which power relations and ideological positions affect cross-cultural communication, with special reference to repressive practices in history, translation policies, media power and commercial hegemonies. It concludes that future translation research will benefit from a more sustained emphasis on the power of technology and economic capital.

The relevance of translation has never been greater. The challenges of the 21st century are truly glocal and societies are required to manage diversities like never before. Cultural and linguistic diversities cut across ideological systems, those carefully crafted to uphold prevailing hierarchies of power, making asymmetries inescapable. Translation and interpreting studies have left behind neutrality and have put forward challenging new approaches that provide a starting point for researching translation as a cultural and historical product in a global and asymmetrical world. This book addresses issues arising from the power vested in and arrogated by translation and interpreting either as instruments of change, or as tools to sustain dominant structures. It presents new perspectives and cutting-edge research findings on how asymmetries are fashioned, woven, upheld, experienced, confronted, resisted, and rewritten through and in translation. This volume is useful for scholars looking for tools to raise awareness as to the challenges posed by the pervasiveness of power relations in mediated communication. It will further help practitioners understand how asymmetries shape their experiences when translating and interpreting.

Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change. World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance. This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.

The digital era is characterised by technological advances that increase the speed and breadth of knowledge turnover within the economy and society. This book examines the impact of these technological advances on translation and interpreting and how new technologies are changing the very nature of language and communication. Reflecting on the innovations in research, practice and training that are associated with this turbulent landscape, chapters consider what these shifts mean for translators and interpreters. Technological changes interact in increasingly complex and pivotal ways with demographic shifts, caused by war, economic globalisation, changing social structures and patterns of mobility, environmental crises, and other factors. As such, researchers face new and often cross-disciplinary fields of inquiry, practitioners face the need to acquire and adopt novel skills and approaches, and trainers face the need to train students for working in a rapidly changing landscape of communication technology. This book brings together advances and challenges from the different but intertwined perspectives of translation and interpreting to examine how the field is changing in this rapidly evolving environment.

This book investigates the role of translation processes in the shaping and re-shaping of ideological discourse and their impact on the actors involved in the translation process, focusing on institutional texts and their influence on lifestyle issues both public and personal. The volume employs a unique approach in its focus on "lifestyle politics," examining texts produced by political actors, such as international organizations and national governments, and their translations. The book draws on an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating work from translation studies and linguistics with political science and economics, and applies it to English and French versions of the same documents, calling attention to ideological differences across versions. In light of our increasingly globalized world, Caimotto and Raus demonstrate the ways in which globalized discourse undergoes processes of depoliticization and marketization which produce a trickle-down effect on individuals’ personal identities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies, critical discourse analysis, and political science.

Envisioned as a much needed celebration of the massive strides made in translation and interpreting studies, this eclectic volume takes stock of the latest cutting-edge research that exemplifies how translation and interpreting might interact with such topics as power, ideological discourse, representation, hegemony and identity. In this exciting volume, we have articles from different language combinations (e.g. Arabic, English, Hungarian and Chinese) and from a wide range of sociopolitical, cultural, and institutional contexts and geographical locales (China, Iran, Malaysia, Russia and Nigeria). Those chapters also draw on a diverse range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches (e.g. critical discourse analysis, Bourdieu’s sociological theories, corpus linguistics, narrative theory and structuration theory), focusing on translation and interpreting relating to various settings and specialised genres (traditional media, digital media, subtitling, manga, etc.). As such, this volume serves as a dynamic forum for intercultural and interlingual communication and an exciting arena for interdisciplinary dialogues, thus enabling us to look beyond the traditionally more static, mechanical and linguistics-oriented views of translation and interpreting. This book appeals to scholars and students interested in translation and interpreting studies and issues of power, ideology, identity in interlingual and intercultural communication.

This volume presents translation as a powerful activity by revisiting the roles of translators and interpreters and the contexts of translation and interpreting in societies affected by globalization and migration. The articles cover topics such as the impact languages have on translation, the institutional constraints in the context of translation, and the challenges within the framework of multimodal translation. In recent years, questions of power in translation have emerged. In such a context, the book presents new research paths that can be related to some of the most discussed issues of recent years in Translation Studies. The contributors are 14 PhD students who investigate the power relations in the context of censorship, ideology, localization, multimodal translation, English as a lingua franca in translation, mandatory genres, and translation by non-professional subject-matter translators. (Series: Representation - Transformation. Translating across Cultures and Societies - Vol. 7)

Translaboration brings translation and collaboration into dialogue with one another. It theorises new forms of collaboration not only between humans, but also between humans and machines, posits the text as an actor in the translation process, and stresses the potential confluence, rather than opposition, of analogue and digital spaces. The contributors to this volume explore translaboration from a wide range of perspectives and challenge prevalent binaries such as analogue/digital, professional/non-professional, paid/voluntary, individual/collective, production/consumption, among others. Their articles shine a light on the social, political, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the power differentials at play in collaborative translation. Through the lens of translaboration, they probe what translation and collaboration are, should be, and are capable of being.