Abstract
Based on a review of the literature on ethnography produced by translation scholars over the past twenty years, this contribution explores how translation studies [TS] has appropriated this concept, first as a way to solve translation problems (with Eugene Nida), then as an object (within the cultural turn) and more recently as a research methodology to document and analyze translation and interpreting events in context. The author shows how, in the early seventies, both cultural anthropology and TS saw a change in paradigm that brought the two disciplines closer at the surface level (as the metaphor of culture as a text gained grounds), but that draw them very much apart from an epistemological viewpoint. Indeed, while ethnography was undertaking an interpretive turn, TS chose to define itself as an empirical discipline based on systematic and objective observation; this positivistic bias in early TS could partly explain its late adoption of ethnography as a research methodology. This literary review finally reminds us of the many dichotomies out of which TS has grown and structured itself — text vs context; translation vs. interpretation; experiential vs. scientific knowledge, hermeneutics vs. empiricism, to name but a few — and suggest the need for an interpretive move within the discipline.
Highlights
Wadensjö 1998; Davidson 2000; Buzelin 2006, 2015; Baraldi and Gavioli 2007; Koskinen 2008; Leblanc 2014)
As a sequel to a discussion initiated in Buzelin (2007), the present contribution revisits the relations between ethnography and translation studies in light of this discourse produced over the past twenty years
To sum up, reviewing TS literature on ethnography reminds us of the many dichotomies out of which the discipline has developed and structured itself — text vs. context, prescription vs. description, applied research vs. pure research, experiential vs. scientific discourse, subjectivism vs. positiv
Summary
Université de Montréal Département de linguistique et de traduction Pavillon Lionel-Groulx C. Translation studies (TS) kept on expanding its horizon, exploring the multiple factors, linguistic and cognitive, cultural, historical, social, institutional and material that come into play when transferring texts across languages and cultures and into other semiotic systems In this process, the discipline kept on borrowing research designs from the social sciences. The goal is not to show the relevance of ethnography for translation studies, as this question has already been addressed before, but rather to reflect on why ethnography, regarded as essential to translation since the earliest days of translation theory, was recognized as a potential methodology for studying translation only fifty years later Exploring this question will lead us to uncover a few relevant features and boundaries in the development of the discipline: 1) a quest for scientificity in TS that encouraged a positivistic posture at a time where social research was, on the whole, moving in the opposite direction; 2) the very imperfect equivalence between Translation Studies and its usual French translation traductologie; 3) the lack of connections and dialogue between translation and interpreting studies, largely due to their separate development
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