Luis Perez-Gonzalez | University of Agder (original) (raw)

Luis Perez-Gonzalez

I am Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Translation and Foreign Languages | www.luisperezgonzalez.org

My research interests fall under four main areas:

:: The Contestation of Key Political and Scientific Concepts in the Digital Sphere

My work in the AHRC-funded project Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space marries my interest in horizontal or deliberative politics with corpus-based translation studies. Drawing on a corpus of Internet discourse in English produced by alternative media and news outlets, I lead a strand of the project exploring how civil society organisations are currently challenging and redefining established meanings and interpretations of key concepts relating to the body politic and to scientific, expert discourse – as radical-democratic projects supersede traditional models of democracy and rationality and their capacity to confer representative authority and canonise knowledge. This 4-year corpus-based project should contribute to raising public awareness of how (re)translation and networked technologies have brought and continue to bring changes to our understanding of key cultural concepts pertaining to these two sets of interconnected concepts.

:: Engaged Subtitling and Citizen Media in the Digital Culture ::

I am interested in the political dimension of amateur subtitling and its contribution to the production and circulation of citizen media content in the digital culture. Informed by cultural studies, affect theory and narrative theory, this strand of my work examines how activist subtitling agencies at the interface between the actual and the digital are able to escape confinement in essentialist categories of identity politics such as social class, race or gender. The premise underpinning this work is that, in post-industrial societies, self-mediation practices such as activist subtitling mirror the ongoing shift from established representation models of democracy towards deliberative forms of governance with the capacity to mobilise fluid radical constituencies and foster the formation of inter-subjectivity through affective flows.

:: Fandom and Audiovisual Translation ::

Since the mid-2000s, amateur subtitling networks have become influential fandom-driven agencies of translation. This participatory (sub)cultural communities, typically referred to as fansubbing groups, have engendered significant tensions over the ownership of consumer-generated media content and threatened the economic and industrial foundations of the audiovisual industry. These ‘prosumption’ communities negotiate and hybridise two conflicting logics of the cultural marketplace: the drive to accrue cultural and symbolic capital in the form of recognition and reputation; and the effort, in some cases, to commoditise the content they produce through their immaterial labour. A number of my publications have sought to gauge the extent to which fansubbing is subverting what had so far been regarded as widely accepted standards of professional mediation/intervention, and the capacity of these alternative mediation conventions to resist and challenge the standardising and domesticating effects of mainstream subtitling practices. My work has also explored the potential of such novel practices to leak out of the boundaries of non-mainstream genres into the domain of mainstream commercial content such as films. By addressing the impact of media convergence, co-creation and immaterial labour on the production and consumption of media content, this body of work has also contributed to re-theorising the place of translation in the globalised media landscape.

:: Discourse, Translation and the Law ::

My doctoral thesis focused on the discursive manifestations of attempted deception in 999 hoax calls, and represented one of the earliest forensic studies of spoken interaction. This work led to the publication of a monograph and a number of papers on the dynamic realisation of genre and discourse modelling in conversation. After completing my thesis, I moved to explore other issues at the interface between language and the law. These included the homogenising effect that globalization is having on courtroom proceedings across legal cultures, as adversarial practices such as trial by jury are adopted in non-adversarial, civil law systems. My publications in this area examine the impact that such changes have had on the performance of translators and courtroom interpreters – given that legal players are often unaware of the pressures that imported Anglo-Saxon practices have on the performance of translators and interpreters trained to work in a non-adversarial environment. More widely, my interest in the study of the interface between language and the law has led me to conduct research into various aspects of legal translator training, including the role that translation technologies play in that process.
Address: Department of Foreign Language and Translation
Universitetet i Agder
Postboks 422
4604 Kristiansand
Norway

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Books by Luis Perez-Gonzalez

(co-edited with Mona Baker, Bolette Blaagaard and Henry Jones) London & New York: Routledge., 2021

This is the fi rst authoritative reference work to map the multifaceted and vibrant site of citiz... more This is the fi rst authoritative reference work to map the multifaceted and vibrant site of citizen media research and practice, incorporating insights from across a wide range of scholarly areas. Citizen media is a fast-evolving terrain that cuts across a variety of disciplines. It explores the physical artefacts, digital content, performative interventions, practices and discursive expressions of aff ective sociality that ordinary citizens produce as they participate in public life to eff ect aesthetic or socio-political change. The seventy-seven entries featured in this pioneering resource provide a rigorous overview of extant scholarship, deliver a robust critique of key research themes and anticipate new directions for research on a variety of topics. Cross-references and recommended reading suggestions are included at the end of each entry to allow scholars from diff erent disciplinary backgrounds to identify relevant connections across diverse areas of citizen media scholarship and explore further avenues of research. Featuring contributions by leading scholars and supported by an international panel of consultant editors, the Encyclopedia is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers in media studies, social movement studies, performance studies, political science and a variety of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. It will also be of interest to non-academics involved in activist movements and those working to eff ect change in various areas of social life.

London & New York: Routledge, 2019

The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation provides an accessible, authoritative and compr... more The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive overview of both the key modalities of audiovisual translation and the main theoretical frameworks, research methods and themes in this rapidly developing field. This reference work, divided in four parts, consists of 32 state-of-the-art chapters from leading international scholars. The first part focuses on established and emerging audiovisual translation modalities, explores the changing contexts in which they have been and continue to be used, and examines how cultural and technological changes are directing their future trajectories. The second part explores the interface between audiovisual translation and a range of theoretical models that have proved particularly productive in steering research in audiovisual translation studies. The third part surveys a range of methodological approaches supporting traditional and innovative ways of interrogating audiovisual translation data. The final part addresses a range of themes pertaining to the place of audiovisual translation in society. This Handbook gives audiovisual translation studies the platform it needs to raise its profile within the Humanities research landscape. This Handbook is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of Audiovisual Translation within Translation studies.

London & New York: Routledge, Aug 12, 2014

From the lucrative blockbusters distributed by Hollywood powerful studios to the brief videos ass... more From the lucrative blockbusters distributed by Hollywood powerful studios to the brief videos assembled and circulated by ordinary people, contemporary screen culture is populated by a growing variety of audiovisual texts travelling across different languages and cultures. Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods, Issues provides a unique focus on the translation of these increasingly influential texts, including their producers and consumers, that now pervade all aspects of our lives. Through a range of examples drawn from different genres, this book moves beyond the linguistic concerns traditionally privileged within audiovisual translation, introducing students and researchers to the artistic, economic, social and political dimensions of this activity.

The book first traces the development and evolution of audiovisual translation, exploring how the homogenizing mediation practices imposed by the industry during the mass media era are being challenged by interventionist forms of translation in the era of the digital culture.

The evolving conceptual network that underpin this area of study, the key translation models driving the theorization of this activity and the most productive methodological approaches to the study of audiovisual translation are then surveyed, critiqued and illustrated in a systematic, easy-to-follow manner. Multimodal theory and self-mediation studies receive particular attention as the most influential theoretical frameworks that will drive audiovisual translation research in years to come. Students and early career scholars are provided with comprehensive guidance to design and undertake audiovisual translation research projects.

Each chapter features chapter summaries, introductory videos, authentic examples, break out boxes, reading suggestions and follow‐up questions for further study. A companion website provides readers with access to additional resources on each of the topics covered in this book.

Audiovisual Translation is the definitive guide to the research models and methodological approaches that are enabling and will continue to drive advances in this fast-developing area of study.

• The book can serve as a textbook for use at MA level but also constitutes a ‘first port‐of‐call’ reference on aspects of theoretical inquiry.
• The book explores new audiovisual translation genres and practices in contemporary networked societies, covering topics and issues not previously discussed in the audiovisual translation literature.
• The book includes a whole chapter offering methodological direction to readers conducting their own research at MA at doctoral level.
• The follow-up questions for discussion in all chapters provide abundant ideas for extended postgraduate essays, various types of dissertation, and (post)doctoral level research projects.

València: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2003

Papers by Luis Perez-Gonzalez

The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context, 2023

This chapter explores how scholarly thinking on context has informed research and disciplinary di... more This chapter explores how scholarly thinking on context has informed research and disciplinary discourses in translation and interpreting studies. It begins with an historical overview of the contribution that linguistics made to the emergence, development and consolidation of translation and interpreting studies as a self-standing discipline between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, previous theorizations of translation and interpreting as forms of mediation positing the essential determinacy of meaning have been superseded by a range of academic perspectives that study how translators and interpreters exercise their professional judgement in context. These range from cognitive approaches exploring how participants in each communicative encounter come to share and make use of a given set of contextual assumptions, to conceptions of context as a field of power play where participants’ identities are dynamically negotiated. This exploration is illustrated with examples from different domains of translation and interpreting research to foreground the breadth of theoretical and methodological orientations that converge within the discipline.

Keywords: translation studies, social perspectives on context, cognitive perspectives on context, static perspectives on context, dynamic perspectives on context, neutral perspectives on context, power-sensitive perspectives on context

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 2nd ed., 2023

Increased globalization, growing mobility of people and commodities, and the spread and intensity... more Increased globalization, growing mobility of people and commodities, and the spread and intensity of armed conflicts since the turn of the twenty-first century have established translation and interpreting more firmly in the public consciousness. Following a brief introduction and historical survey of translation and interpreting studies as a scholarly discipline, this chapter explores a range of issues that have interested both translation scholars and applied linguists in recent years. These include the contribution that translation and interpreting make to the delivery of institutional agendas in various settings; the negotiation of power differentials in a range of social settings; the role of translation in social movements and activist initiatives seeking to redress inequality; and the involvement of translators and interpreters as important political players in armed conflicts. The chapter then focuses on the role that translation and interpreting play in promoting cultural and linguistic diversity against the backdrop of the dominance of English as a lingua franca, examining the challenges posed by new multimodal genres arising from technological developments in digital culture. Future directions for the discipline of translation and interpreting studies are considered in the concluding section.

Unsettling Translation, 2022

This chapter focuses on subtitled vlogs published by Western influencers on Chinese social media ... more This chapter focuses on subtitled vlogs published by Western influencers on Chinese social media at the behest of the Chinese authorities. In particular, it explores the role these vlogs play in promoting official narratives about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a media ecosystem characterized by restricted access to foreign content and the absence of public debate on matters pertaining to the image that China attempts to project abroad, foreign vlogs, I argue, are deployed to secure the alignment and acquiescence of social media users with official discourses and policies, against the backdrop of ongoing propaganda offensives on social media. Drawing on the concept of strategic narratives developed by international relations scholars, the chapter examines how the circulation of subtitled media content provides Chinese netizens with sense-making devices that facilitate the negotiation and forging of shared meanings about their country’s place on the international scene, ultimately contributing to the entrenchment of digital nationalism. Analysis of the body of danmu (bullet comments) posted by viewers of the vlog chosen as a case study reveals that the parochialism of Chinese social media platforms like Bilibili allows political elites to capitalize on mundane affectivity, whether genuine or confected, in order to promote allegiance to official strategic narratives without the need for deliberation in the digital public sphere.

(with Mona Baker, Bolette Blaagaard and Henry Jones) ‘Introduction’, in Mona Baker, Bolette Blaagaard, Henry Jones and Luis Pérez-González (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media, London & New York: Routledge, xxiii-xxviii, 2021

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7(92)

Climate change science has become an increasingly polarized site of controversy, where discussion... more Climate change science has become an increasingly polarized site of controversy, where discussions on epistemological rigour are difficult to separate from debates on the impact that economic and political interests have on the production of evidence and the construction of knowledge. Little research has been conducted so far on the antagonistic discursive processes through which climate knowledge is being contested and traditional forms of expertise are being (de-)legitimized-whether by members of the scientific community or non-scientist actors. This corpus-based study contributes to previous scholarship on the climate science controversy in a number of respects. Unlike earlier studies based on the analysis of mainstream media articles, this paper interrogates a corpus of climate change blog posts published by scientists, journalists, researchers and lobbyists laying claim to core, contributory and interactional forms of expertise-as conceptualized within the third wave of science studies. Further, the corpus informing this study has been designed to reflect the complex and multivoiced nature of the climate knowledge production process. Drawn from five different blogs, the views represented are not confined to the two poles between which the entrenched dialectic of 'alarmists' versus 'deniers' is typically played out in the climate science debate. Following a systemic functional conceptualization of dialogic engagement as a means of positioning authorial voices vis-à-vis competing perspectives construed and referenced in a text, this paper reports on bloggers' use of three lexical items (bias, dogma and peer review) to expose their reliance on (non-)epistemic values. Concordances and a range of visualization tools are used to gain systematic insights into the network of lexical choices that obtain around these items, and to gauge whether/how bloggers construct coherent authorial subjectivities in a bid to claim expert status and/or question the recognition of other players in the debate.

in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 346-351., 2020

in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 172-177., 2020

in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 30-34., 2020

in Luis Pérez-González (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation, London & New York: Routledge, 1-12., 2019

Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation

in Mona Baker and Bolette Blagaard (eds) Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent (in press, 2016), 2016

Self-mediated audiovisual content produced by ordinary citizens on digital media platforms reveal... more Self-mediated audiovisual content produced by ordinary citizens on digital media platforms reveals interesting aspects of the negotiation of affinity and antagonism among members of virtual transnational constituencies. Based on Pratt’s (1987) conceptualization of contact zones, this chapter examines the role played by communities of activist subtitlers – characterized here as emerging agents of political intervention in public life – in facilitating the transnational flow of self-mediated textualities. I argue that by contesting the harmonizing pressure of corporate media structures and maximizing the visibility of non-hegemonic voices within mainstream-oriented audiovisual cultures, activist subtitling collectivities typify the ongoing shift from representative to deliberative models of public participation in post-industrial societies. The chapter also engages with the centrality of affect – conceptualized from the disciplinary standpoint of biopolitics (Foucault 2007, 2008) – as a mobilizing force that fosters inter-subjectivity within and across radical subtitling collectivities. Drawing on an example of how emotions reverberate within a virtual community of amateurs subtitling the controversial BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares into Spanish, I examine how affect is generated by the practices surrounding the production and reception of subtitled material, and how the circulation flows of content through digital communication systems contributes to assembling an audience of affective receptivity.

Bermann, Sandra and Catherine Porter (eds) A Companion to Translation Studies

""Recent scholarly developments both within and outside translation studies attest to the growing... more ""Recent scholarly developments both within and outside translation studies attest to the growing perception among researchers that, in the pursuit of understanding processes of interlingual and intercultural transfer and mediation, analysing language is not enough. The centrality of (mostly written) language in translation studies research is hardly surprising, with linguistics being widely regarded as the discipline which has most informed the study of translation and interpreting since they emerged as a field of academic inquiry in the middle of the twentieth century (Baker 1996). The emphasis of early research on short, often decontextualised stretches of text (Baker and Pérez-González 2010) resulted in an excision of language – understood as text or discourse – from its context that has become the object of growing scrutiny by translation and interpreting scholars over the last two decades. More importantly, this displacement of language from context has favoured the analysis of language and its instantiation in discourse separately from other forms of meaning-making resources. This paper sets out to examine recent theoretical developments seeking to redress the displacement of language from other kinds of meaning-making resources and their impact on the theorisation of translation and interpreting.
The starting premise of this chapter is that academic interest in non-verbal semiotic resources and their role in processes of interlingual and intercultural transfer is unevenly spread across different scholarly strands within the discipline. As far as the breadth of this research agenda is concerned, images appear to be the only non-linguistic meaning-making signs showing an increasingly recognised potential to inform research in translation studies. Dialogue interpreting, audiovisual and drama translation, to give but a few examples, still lack the theoretical and methodological concepts and tools to systematically analyse semiotic resources such as the gestures and facial expressions accentuating face-to-face conversation; the choices of fonts, colours and patterns of textual-visual interaction in printed advertisements; or the use of music and lighting in the staging of a drama production, respectively.
This paper surveys ongoing research on how different semiotic resources shape translational behaviour in different communicative contexts, including but not limited to the interaction between speech and image in printed media and motion pictures; the modelling of composite semiotic systems, such as movement, gestures and gaze; the representation of identities and ideologies using non-verbal resources; and the conceptualisation of space, interpersonal perspective and salience in a range of settings, such as museums. The paper then moves on to explore how insights imported from multimodal theory, as developed in the field of systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics, may help translation and interpreting scholars to gain new insights into old data. Key notions like ‘multimodal’, ‘multimedial’, ‘mode’, ‘modality’, ‘sub-mode’ and ‘medial realisation’ are introduced and explored in some detail.
The contribution of multimodal insights to research in translation studies are also gauged in relation to new data and their contexts of production, as illustrated by the way in which different modes function semiotically when combined in the modern discourse worlds afforded by the computer and the Internet. In these ‘new media’, information is proliferating in forms which push our methods of sharing it effectively; the shape of discourse communities using, assessing and circulating translations is changing with the changing shape of texts; ideological currents engaging with the interpretation of translations are flowing beyond existing linguistic means of analysis and critique; and new amateur phenomena, mainly fandom and political activism, are increasingly appropriating translation and interpreting as a means to effect social change.
The final section (before the conclusion) considers the methodological implications of multimodal research in translation and interpreting studies, with particular emphasis on new tools like multimodal transcriptions and multimodal corpora.
""

(co-edited with Mona Baker, Bolette Blaagaard and Henry Jones) London & New York: Routledge., 2021

London & New York: Routledge, 2019

London & New York: Routledge, Aug 12, 2014

Audiovisual Translation is the definitive guide to the research models and methodological approaches that are enabling and will continue to drive advances in this fast-developing area of study.

València: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2003

The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context, 2023

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 2nd ed., 2023

Unsettling Translation, 2022

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7(92)

in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 346-351., 2020

in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 172-177., 2020

in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 30-34., 2020

in Luis Pérez-González (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation, London & New York: Routledge, 1-12., 2019

Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation

in Mona Baker and Bolette Blagaard (eds) Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent (in press, 2016), 2016

Bermann, Sandra and Catherine Porter (eds) A Companion to Translation Studies

Juliane House (ed.) Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach

This chapter sets out to investigate the role that amateur translation plays in the process of me... more This chapter sets out to investigate the role that amateur translation plays in the process of media convergence and gauge the extent to which the proliferation of co-creational practices pertaining to the production, translation and distribution of subtitled media content blur the distinction between the roles of producer and consumer in political news interviews. I begin by exploring how the role of translation within global news media has been theorized in recent years and teasing out the implications of technological changes for the blurring of news production, consumption and translation. I then focus on the social processes that have prompted the emergence of amateur communities of journalists/translators, whether in the form of structured activist networks or fluid groupings of engaged citizens, as influential agents in the digital mediascape. The chapter then articulates the implications of these developments for the discipline of translation studies, including the shift from referential accuracy towards narrative negotiation and the politics of affinity as the main drives informing amateur news mediation. The issues raised in this essay are illustrated with a case study involving the subtitling of a political news interview by amateur mediators.

DOI:10.1177/1354856512466381, 2013

Media sociologists and cultural globalization theorists have tended to overlook the contribution ... more Media sociologists and cultural globalization theorists have tended to overlook the contribution of translators to the circulation of media content in the era of digital culture. After critiquing the reasons for the invisibility of translation in the literature on global cultural transactions, this article moves on to examine the emergence of new amateur subtitling collectivities in today’s informational society, exploring the role that non-professional translators – specifically, networks of activist subtitlers – play within the participatory media industries. Using examples from a case study of Ansarclub, a Spanish group of engaged amateur translators, this article gauges the extent to which their participation, remediation and bricolage practices – the main components of digital culture (Deuze [2006] Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society 22: 63–75) – fit in or divert from the cocreational dynamics underpinning other domains of the media marketplace. It is argued that the interventionist and ‘monitorial’ quality of activist subtitling lies at the heart of an emerging paradigm of civic engagement, with fluid transnational communities of interest acting as the building blocks of participatory translation.

This article explores the emergence of transformative subtitling practices in the digital culture... more This article explores the emergence of transformative subtitling practices in the digital culture, a context of production shaped by the dialectical relation between technological advances and cultural change. Drawing on a qualitative discussion of fansubbing practices, the article contends that transformative subtitling signals a clear move towards a regime of co-creation between producers and users of media content, fostering mutual recognition between these increasingly blurred camps. The second part of the article delivers an analytical discussion of examples of authorial titling in mainstream British drama to demonstrate the penetration of transformative subtitling in commercial media products that also posit spectatorial subjectivity. The article concludes by reflecting on the parataxic reading practices that these new subtitling practices encourage and the fluid nature of the transnational collectivities it caters for.

DOI:10.1080/14708477.2012.722100, 2012

Developments in communication technologies have brought about the proliferation of self-mediated ... more Developments in communication technologies have brought about the proliferation of self-mediated textualities and empowered networks of non-professional translators to engage in participatory subtitling practices. These subtitling agencies are often part of a movement of cultural resistance against global capitalist structures and institutions, whether for aesthetic or political reasons. This article gauges the extent to which participatory subtitling challenges assumptions underpinning traditional scholarship on intercultural communication, as instantiated in the pragmatics of audio-visual translation. It is argued that affectivity emerges as a powerful non-representational force behind amateur mediation. Rather than simply aiming to deliver ‘accurate’ representations of the source text meaning, amateur subtitles seek to performatively intervene in the articulation and reception of the audio-visual semiotic ensemble. Drawing on selected examples of aesthetic and political subtitling activism, this article examines the relevance of non-representational theory, originally developed within the field of human geography, to the study of the expressive or transformational role of amateur subtitling. It is suggested that the epistemological and political dimensions of this non-representational phenomenon are symptomatic of a wider trend towards a radical model of democracy.

Special Issue Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting. Participatory and Engaged Perspectives, 2012

Translation studies finds itself today at a stage where its traditional focus on translator and i... more Translation studies finds itself today at a stage where its traditional focus on translator and interpreter training and on the advancement of the status of translators and interpreters as professionals is no longer sufficient to address the complexity of real-life situations of translating and interpreting. As increasing numbers of non-professionals translate and interpret in a wider range of contexts and in more diversified forms, their work emerges not only as an alternative to established professional practice, but also as a distinctive phenomenon, which the discipline has yet to recognize as a noteworthy area of study. This article looks into the relatively uncharted territory of non-professional translation and interpreting, drawing mainly on Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of global transactions, and offers a number of insights into what these new developments might mean for the discipline at large.

Special Issue on Translation and the Genealogy of Conflict, 2012

While the growing ubiquitousness of translation and interpreting has established these activities... more While the growing ubiquitousness of translation and interpreting has established these activities more firmly in the public consciousness, the extent of the translators’ and interpreters’ contribution to the continued functioning of cosmopolitan and participatory postmodern societies remains largely misunderstood. This paper argues that the theorisation of translation and interpretation as social phenomena and of translators/interpreters as agents contributing to the stability or subversion of social structures through their capacity to re-define the context in which they mediate constitutes a recent development in the evolution of the discipline. The consequentiality of the mediators’ agency, one of the most significant insights to come out of this new body of research, is particularly evident in situations of social, political and cultural confrontation. It is contended that this conceptualisation of agency opens up the possibility of translation being used not only to resolve conflict and tension, but also to promote them. Through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, the contributing authors to this special issue explore a number of sites of linguistic and cultural mediation across a range of institutional settings and textual/interactional genres, with particular emphasis on the contribution of translation and interpreting to the genealogy of conflict. The papers presented here address a number of overlapping themes, including the dialectics of governmental policy-making and translation, the interface between translation, politics and the media, the impact of the narrative affiliation of translators and interpreters as agents of mediation, the frictional dynamics of interpreter-mediated institutional encounters and the dynamics of identity negotiation.

in Simpson, James (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 39-52, 2011

Baker, Mona, Maeve Olohan and María Calzada Pérez (eds) (2010) Text and Context, 259-287, 2010

This paper sets out to explore how translation is increasingly being appropriated by politically ... more This paper sets out to explore how translation is increasingly being appropriated by politically engaged individuals without formal training to respond effectively to the socio-economic structures that sustain global capitalism. Drawing on a generative conceptualization of translation activism and insights from globalization studies and media sociology, the paper traces the genealogy of an activist community subtitling a televised interview with Spain’s former Prime Minister, José María Aznar López, originally broadcast by BBC News 24 against the background of the ongoing military conflict between Lebanon and Israel. The analysis suggests that these communities of ‘non-translators’ emerge through dynamic processes of contextualization, involving complex negotiations of narrative affinity among their members. It is argued that, in contrast to more traditional groupings of activist translators, these fluid networks of engaged mediators constitute ‘ad-hocracies’ that capitalize on the potential of networked communication to exploit their collective intelligence. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the growing importance of such ad-hocracies for the future of activist translation and its theorization.

The Translator 21(1), 2015

Communication and the Public, 2023

Participatory Subtitling in the Danmu Comment Culture Subverting the Hierarchy of Consumable Cont... more Participatory Subtitling in the Danmu Comment Culture
Subverting the Hierarchy of Consumable Content in China’s Social Media
Special Issue of Communication and the Public
(Volume 8, Issue 4, December 2023)
Guest Editor Luis Pérez-González (University of Agder, Norway)

The International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture is aimed at an intern... more The International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture is aimed at an international audience and will primarily address the needs of doctoral and early career researchers in translation and interpreting studies, as well as more experienced academics who are new to the discipline or interested in engaging with recent developments in the field. It aims to contribute to realizing one of the priorities of the Jiao Tong Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, namely, advancing the study of translation in the context of digital (audiovisual) media and online spaces.

The School will take place in Jiao Tong University, Shanghai once every two years, starting in July 2019 and rotating thereafter with the ARTIS International Research School.

The production and circulation of knowledge across temporal and cultural spaces is a well-establi... more The production and circulation of knowledge across temporal and cultural spaces is a well-established research theme among classicists and historians of political thought, ideas, science and medicine, but recent developments have opened up new perspectives on this area of study. The study of social knowledge flows has advanced our understanding of these transit processes in critical and productive ways. While earlier 'diffusionist' models of knowledge production and distribution were predicated on the ascendancy of European thought and science, and the treatment of other cultures as no more than producers of data to be collected, theorised and understood, emerging models of social knowledge foreground how the very process of circulation produces new knowledge and recognise the contribution of all actors and locations traversed by such flows over time. This development is particularly welcome at a time when the media of knowledge production and circulation, successively moulded by the manuscript, print and electronic cultures, are being reconfigured in the digital culture of the 21 st century. In this deterritorialised and decentralised arena of instantaneous knowledge production and circulation, " questions of trust, testimony, and communitarian objectivity are simultaneously questions of how knowledge travels, to whom it is available, and how agreement is achieved [or not] " between experts and ordinary people (Secord 2004: 660-661). Social movement and digital media scholars who advocate and practise alternative forms of political participation and collective forms of knowledge construction are therefore increasingly playing an important role in reconceptualising these trajectories of knowledge production and contestation. The contribution of translation to these processes across centuries and cultures has long been documented and studied. A significant body of research, often undertaken by scholars outside translation studies, has drawn on a range of case studies to show how concepts and values have been and continue to be renegotiated and transformed at specific historical junctures through processes of (re)translation, rewriting and other forms of mediation. But translation is becoming enmeshed in the study of knowledge production and circulation in new and exciting ways. New and powerful computerised tools promise to enable researchers