Macro- and micro-turns in translation studies

Abstract

Definitions of translation studies are changing. While historically focused on the process or product of translation at a national European level, new definitions by scholars such as Mukherjee, Trivedi, Cheung, and Tymoczko are expanding the parameters of translation by exploring how the field is defined in international non-European contexts — in India, China, the Arab world, for example. Other scholars, such as Cronin, Simon, Apter, and Brodzki are looking at subnational locations, including within cities, diasporic communities within cities, and even between generations within individual families in those communities. This paper looks at how translation is defined and studied in such macro- and micro-contexts in the Americas, suggesting that translation is less something that happens between national cultures and more something, especially among immigrants and linguistic minorities, that comprises the very basis upon which those cultures are constructed.