July 2020 ARTIS Programme

Narrative Theory

Various versions of narrative theory have exercised considerable influence across the humanities for several decades, but translation studies did not begin to engage with this powerful theoretical tradition until well into the twenty-first century. The particular strand of narrative theory introduced in Baker (2006) has since been successfully applied and extended in a growing range of studies, but some scholars who find the theory attractive also find it difficult to apply in a sustained manner. This session will offer a brief overview of the theory and explore some of the ways in which narrative analysis has been operationalized at the micro level, by exemplifying a greater range of textual and non-textual devices through which a narrative may be elaborated in the context of translation and interpreting. It will also attempt to demonstrate that the ability of narrative analysis to draw on an open-ended and diffuse set of features and devices is empowering rather than inhibiting, and that despite its open-endedness the analysis can and should be undertaken systematically.

Reading

Baker, Mona (2018) ‘Narrative Analysis and Translation’, in Kirsten Malmkjær (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics, London & New York: Routledge, 179-193.

Baker, Mona (2010) ‘Narratives of Terrorism and Security: ‘Accurate’ Translations, Suspicious Frames’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 3(3): 347-364.

Translation and affect

Sociology of translation has, for some two decades now, emphasized that translation is social action. In this talk I will focus on one particular aspect of its social life: the affects and emotions attached to it. The lecture will be organized around two central ideas: that some affects are particularly sticky (Ahmed 2004) and that dealing with the affective requires work (affective or emotional labour, Hochschild 1983), and that this work can and will be taught and learned. Drawing on examples from different areas of translation and interpreting, we will discuss and explore the complex combinations of shared and felt affects in translatorial activities, including researching translation.

Reading

Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP.

Hochschild, A., R. (2003). The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: University of California Press (orig. 1983).

Corpus-based Translation Studies: Past and Present

Corpora are electronic collections of texts that can be processed automatically or sem-automatically in a variety of ways, depending on the availability of certain types of software. Corpus-based Translation Studies developed in the mid 1990s, when the Translational English Corpus was created at the Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester. This was the first ever computerised collection of authentic, published translations into English from a variety of source languages and by a wide range of professional translators, but since then many corpora of translated texts have been created in different languages, and research in this area has witnessed a huge boom since the turn of the century. Initially focused on investigating a range of issues to do with the distinctive nature of translated text and the style of individual translators, the field has now moved on with the launch of the Genealogies of Knowledge project, also at the University of Manchester, in 2016. This project involves creating large electronic corpora, of both translated and non-translated text, in four historical lingua francas: ancient Greek, medieval Arabic, Latin and modern English. The focus is on tracing the evolution and contestation of key concepts in political and scientific thought across different historical epochs – largely, but not exclusively, through translation.

This session will offer an overview of Corpus-based Translation Studies and demonstrate some of the methodologies involved in interrogating electronic corpora, with examples drawn from both the Translational English Corpus and the Genealogies of Knowledge Corpus. Both corpora are accessible through the Genealogies of Knowledge website, together with the relevant software interface.

Reading

Baker, Mona (2004) ‘A Corpus-based View of Similarity and Difference in Translation’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(2): 167-193.

Jones, Henry (2019) ‘Searching for Statesmanship: A Corpus-Based Analysis of a Translated Political Discourse’, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 36(2). Available (open access) at https://brill.com/view/journals/agpt/36/2/article-p216_2.xml.

Case study methodology

Case study research is one of the most widely used research methods within translation studies. The session will introduce the characteristics of case studies and the categories of case, example and unit; elaborate on the diverse ways of structuring research reports; and, discuss some of the pitfalls to be avoided in designing case studies. It will also focus on the relationships between case study, generalisations and theoretical frameworks. Through several exercises, the session intends to sharpen the students’ research focus and awareness of the possibilities offered by their data, and to invite them to think about how to achieve valid, useful and transferrable results based on their findings.

Reading

Meyer, Bernd. 2016. Case studies. Claudia V. Angelelli and Briand James Baer eds. Researching Translation and Interpreting. London and New York: Routledge. 177-184.

Saldanha, Gabriela and Sharon O’Brien. 2013. Context-oriented research: case studies. Saldanha and O’Brien eds. Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. 205-233.

Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2009. The Case Study Research Method in Translation Studies. Ian Mason ed. Training for Doctoral Research, special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer (ITT): 37-56.

Translation and social movements

The session will first look at the various ways social movements and translation may intersect. It will then delineate the outlines of a case study on the role of translation in social knowledge-making by focusing on a particular movement which challenges, as well as builds upon, mainstream medical discourse. The objective of the session is to demonstrate the wide variety of data that should be gathered in order to present a brief history of any contemporary social movement, as a case study for the circulation of ideas through translation and the contribution of translations to paradigmatic shifts within a society. The session will also bring examples on how narrative theory may be used for the purposes of studying social movements; it will thus be in dialogue with prior sessions on case study and narrative theory.

Reading

Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2010. Whose ‘Modernity’ is it Anyway? Translation in the Web-based Natural-birth Movement in Turkey. Elif Daldeniz ed. Contemporary Perspectives on Translation in Turkey, special issue of Translation Studies (Routledge) 3(2): 231-245.

Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem. 2019. Diversity of translational data in contemporary social knowledge making, Rafael Y. Schögler (ed.) Circulation of Academic Thought. Rethinking Translation in the Academic Field. Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang. 77-91.

Participatory/collaborative forms of translation

Innovations in communication and information technology have given rise to diverse forms of online collaborative translation, which increasingly play crucial roles in the contexts of social movements, citizen journalism, disaster response, and popular culture. The translation activities taking place within participatory networks or communities are based on interactive, peer production models of translation, carried out by individuals with different levels of professional translation training. The members of these transnational communities, located across various geographical contexts and using digital platforms, engage in acts of self-expression via translation, seeking to widen the range of voices and perspectives in circulation and intervene in the transnational flow of media content. Their practices, which center on sets of shared values and collective discursive spaces, often involve negotiating cultural identities, effecting aesthetic or socio-political changes, resisting against prevailing socio-economic structures, and altering the traditionally established distribution channels of cultural products.

In this session, theoretical and methodological issues related to participatory forms of translation will be addressed. The session starts with a consideration of concepts and methodological tools used by researchers to investigate participatory translation in relation to participatory politics and transnational fandom. In the second part of the session, cases of different forms of participatory translation will be offered to demonstrate some of the ways in which the disciplinary discourses of translation studies can be extended to better account for the relation between agency and structure, and the economic and cultural values generated by participatory translation.

Reading

Baker, Mona. 2013. “Translation as an alternative space for political action.” Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 12(1): 23-47.

Olohan, Maeve. 2014. “Why do you translate? Motivation to volunteer and TED translation.” Translation Studies 7(1): 17-33.

Pérez-González, Luis. 2017. “Investigating digitally born amateur subtitling agencies in the context of popular culture.” In David Orrego-Carmona and Yvonne Lee (Eds), Non-Professional Subtitling. Newscastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 15-36.

Historical research into institutional translation

Translation and interpreting policies and practices in multilingual institutions have been studied extensively, but often within a contemporary perspective, either collecting large corpora of discourse from within a limited time frame or by doing field work within an organization. A wealth of information has been uncovered, but these approaches cannot well capture the changeability of institutional practices. Institutions aim for constancy and standardization, but they also have a life span that affects how translation and interpreting take place. In my lecture I will discuss two longitudinal case studies that shed light on the temporal changeability of institutions: A study of late 19th century Tampere and the role of interpreting and translating in the new city council will shed light on how institutional translation and interpreting practices may not only reflect existing multilingual realities but also actively shape those realities. The other case study, a return to some of my findings on EU translation 15 years later is a more contemporary example of how material and political changes also instigate changes in institutional practices, and how by observing what stays constant in spite if these changes we can begin to discern what is essential to the nature of institutional translation.

Reading

Koskinen, Kaisa (in press). Translating in an Emerging Language Policy: Tampere City Council 1875–1887. In Lieven D’hulst & Kaisa Koskinen (eds) Translating in Town. A history of local translation policies during the European 19th century. Bloomsbury (forthcoming 2020).

Koskinen, Kaisa (2014). Institutional Translation: The Art of Governing by Translation. Kang, Ji-Hae (ed.) Translation in institutions. Special issue of Perspectives. 22(4). 479–492.

Koskinen, Kaisa (2013). Social media and the institutional illusions of EU communication Tosi, Arturo (ed) ‘The EU multilingual translation in an ecology of language perspective’, special issue of International Journal of Applied Linguistics 23 (1).  80–92.

Ethical issues in institutional translation

Building on Wednesday’s discussion on historical research on institutional translation, this session examines research on more recent developments related to translation taking place within and across public and private institutions. The digitization of communicative and economic processes has transformed the ways in which translation is approached, understood, and utilized in institutional contexts. The translation needs of government agencies, international organizations, educational and media institutions, and private businesses have traditionally been met by in-house or outsourced professional translators. More recently, however, innovations in information and communication technology have provided institutions, both for-profit and non-profit, with additional options, ranging from the use of machine translation to translation crowdsourcing, which are viewed as yielding cheaper, faster, and more efficient translation results.

The change in the ways in which institutions approach translation has altered translation quality expectations, priorities concerning translation work, and perceptions concerning translation and translators. While ethical issues that have traditionally been associated with institutional translation, such as professional and social responsibility, equality and linguistic justice, and institutional allegiance and clash of values, among others, continue to be noteworthy concerns for translation practitioners and researchers, the rise in the use of machine translation and crowdsourcing has brought to the fore a range of other ethical problems. They include data privacy matters, fairness and problems of cheap/free digital labor, de-professionalization of translation work, de-humanizing of translation, and the reuse of translations as data. Yet, the exponential pace of technological progress, as well as extensive changes in institutional and economic environment, has greatly outpaced our understanding of the ethical implications of recent developments.

This session starts from the premise that discussions concerning institutional translation need to be extended to deal with translation within and related to institutional contexts in the digital era. It examines concepts developed at the interface between institutional theory, political economy, and media sociology that can yield insights into how the practice and use of translation has evolved in institutional settings. In the second part of this session, different cases of institutional translation will be discussed to highlight and reflect on ethical issues.

Reading

Cadwell, Patrick, Sheila Castilho, Sharon O’Brien and Linda Mitchell. 2016. “Human factors in machine translation and post-editing among institutional translators.” Translation Spaces 5(2): 222-243.

Jimenez-Crespo, Miguel A. 2017. “How much would you like to pay? Reframing and expanding the notion of translation quality through crowdsourcing and volunteer approaches.” Perspectives 25(3): 478-491.

Publishing in International Journals

Publishing in peer-reviewed international journals is now key to progressing in an academic career anywhere in the world. With the proliferation of journals that are becoming increasingly focused on either specialist strands of various sub-disciplines or on specific cross-disciplinary themes, identifying a suitable outlet for a research article and pitching it at the right level for that outlet has become a complex affair. This session will draw on the tutor’s experience as a journal editor, as well as a referee for a large number of high-ranking periodicals within and outside the field of translation studies. In addition to established journals of translation studies, emphasis will be placed on publishing in journals associated with other disciplinary domains that are potentially open to engagement with scholars of translation. Illustrative, anonymized examples from various types of submission and referee feedback will be used to outline recurrent patterns of writing and structuring research articles that result in negative assessment and rejection, and guidance on avoiding such patterns and producing research articles that meet international standards of excellence will be provided.

Competing for Grants

A great deal of research at universities nowadays is funded from local, national or international sources. Success in obtaining funding may allow you to dedicate some or all of your time to a research project, and a proven ability to capture research funding is often a requirement for senior promotions. The session will focus on writing persuasive grant applications, including such things as: how to present the significance of your proposal, how to communicate your ideas to a panel of experts in fields not your own, how to ensure your proposal looks ambitious and innovative as well as realistic and feasible, how to match intellectual scope with material resources, how to demonstrate your suitability for a particular project, how to plan for deliverables, and how to put together a budget. We will also talk about team projects, and about how not to be downhearted when an application fails.