1st International Conference The (Politics of) Translation (of Politics) University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain 27-28 June 2016 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: The politics of translation and the translation of politics
The International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research, 2020
In their introduction to the much-quoted edited collection Translation, Power, Subversion, Álvarez and Vidal (1996, p. 2) posit that translation is one the most representative paradigms of the clash between cultures. In their view, it is important to examine the relationship between the production of "knowledge in a given culture and its transmission, relocation and reinterpretation in the target culture". Álvarez and Vidal underscore the influence of the translator as well as the power relationship that the source and target cultures may have upon the translation practice. Although twenty-five years have passed since the publication of their book, Álvarez and Vidal's work keeps resonating in a world that has become increasingly globalized and where power can be exerted in myriad ways. For Álvarez and Vidal, translation is a political act. And, it may be added, non-translation also is. The influence of politics on translation practice can be observed in the translation of political texts but, as Gagnon claims (2010, p. 252), also in the use of translation as a political statement. The former can be exemplified by the translation of political speeches, such as that of President Donald Trump's inaugural address (discussed by Caimotto's article in this special issue); the translation of news articles, such as those rendered into English and Portuguese by El País or into Spanish and Chinese by The New York Times; and the translation of political texts, such as the works of Karl Marx and his followers that were rendered into Chinese at the beginning of twentieth century. As for translation as a political statement, it refers to the underlying policies that lead to those translations. If we peruse the Spanish versions of The New York Times, for instance, we realize that the texts are only a small fraction of what is published in the English version. The same applies to the English articles that appeared in El País. This is, of course, related to the limited resources apportioned to the translation services of these media, but the very selection of news items to be translated is also a political act. An excellent example to study the way in which ideologies influence translation practices was the simultaneous appointments of Spain's new Prime Minister and El País's new editor back in 2018. These events provide us with an excellent example of how translation can be reflective of the ideological affinity between a government and a specific news corporation (for a discussion, see Valdeón, 2020).
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics - index of contents and contributors
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the multiple ways in which ‘politics’ and ‘translation’ interact. Divided into four sections with thirty-three chapters written by a roster of international scholars, this handbook covers the translation of political ideas, the effects of political structures on translation and interpreting, the politics of translation and an array of case studies that range from the Classical Mediterranean to contemporary China. Considering established topics such as censorship, gender, translation under fascism, translators and interpreters at war, as well as emerging topics such as translation and development, the politics of localization, translation and interpreting in democratic movements, and the politics of translating popular music, the handbook offers a global and interdisciplinary introduction to the intersections between translation and interpreting studies and politics. With a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation theory, politics and related areas.
The Criterion, 2013
"To study the political forces behind the translation and its process has been one of the thrust areas in the field of Translation Studies .There is always a motivation behind a translation and its construction of meaning. This motivation may be sociocultural and political. From the very act of selecting a text to interpret it in translation is a conscious deliberate process which cannot resist sociocultural and political forces. This paper has studied some of the important motivating factors in translation, on translation and for translation. In other words, this paper will try to answer the following questions. How these forces act in translation? What happens in translation? What is the translation for?"
Akdeniz Language Studies Conference Translation and ideology: a critical reading
The recent interest in the relation between translation and ideology led to the following project based on a comparative analysis among the Italian short novel for children Pinocchio and its three translations (English, Russian and Turkish) to highlight how the translation choices are determined by a specific cultural background and ruling power. If external influences cannot be avoided, a translation should respect its main scope of being the source for a cultural change. Therefore, the two questions that have eventually to be answered are how does the critics of translation relate to the ethics of translation and how can the common reader be protected from unconscious manipulation. Reasoning about the translato position and the importance of critical reading and foreign language classes will serve the purpose.
Translation and Ideology: A Critical Reading
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
The recent interest in the relation between translation and ideology led to the following project based on a comparative analysis among the Italian short novel for children Pinocchio and its three translations (English, Russian and Turkish) to highlight how the translation choices are determined by a specific cultural background and ruling power. If external influences cannot be avoided, a translation should respect its main scope of being the source for a cultural change. Therefore, the two questions that have eventually to be answered are how does the critics of translation relate to the ethics of translation and how can the common reader be protected from unconscious manipulation. Reasoning about the translato position and the importance of critical reading and foreign language classes will serve the purpose.
Ideological implications of translation decisions
Quaderns, 1998
This paper will present considerations on how translation decisions regarding culturebound institutional terms influence the portrayal for the target culture (and thus at least in part the target readers' perception) of the institutions referred to, and indeed by extension of the culture to which they belong. The issues will be illustrated using several examples drawn from a corpus of texts relating to Spain taken from the British press. This corpus forms the basis of a wider-ranging study of the portrayal of Spain in the British press from a critical discourse analysis perspective, of which translation-related issues form a part. The paper will analyse how decisions taken in translation solutions can introduce ideological elements, in particular positive self-and negative other-representation, which reproduce and reinforce myths or stereotypes existing in the target culture regarding the source culture.
Globalization and the Politics of Translation Studies
Meta: Journal des traducteurs, 2006
Globalization can be seen as a consequence of technologies reducing the costs of communication. This reduction has led both to the rise of English as the international lingua franca and to an increase in the global demand for translations. The simultaneous movement on both fronts is explained by the divergent communication strategies informing the production and distribution of information, where translation can only be expected to remain significant for distribution, and not for production. The fundamental change in the resulting communication patterns is the emergence of one-to-many document production processes, which are displacing the traditional source-target models still used in Translation Studies. Translation Studies might nevertheless retain a set of political principles that could constitute its own identity with respect to globalization. Such principles would be expressed in the national and regional organization of the discipline, in the defense of minority cultures, an...