Abstract

“The biggest chunk of my job involves translation; I am, for all intents and purposes, a translator,” said Arif Asya,1 a Turkish corporate lawyer who was part of a roundtable in the Regulatory Translations workshop we held in Istanbul in May 2013. Being a corporate lawyer and working for foreign clients, as well as local ones, he argued, put him in situations where he had to actively engage in cultural and linguistic translations. At times, he needed to translate the business context and local sensitivities to a foreign client, a process that included, in his words, “selective translations,” which effectively meant nontranslations. Sometimes, he needed to translate local laws to local clients because such laws, having been distilled not only from Ottoman and Turkish history, but also from Roman and German law, contained quite arcane language. Asya’s intervention as a practicing corporate lawyertranslator in an otherwise academic setting was a powerful reminder that as scholars we also, to some extent, are engaged in constant processes of translation. For in the workshop where earlier versions of the papers in this collection were presented, participants not only used the concept of “translation” as an analytic in their respective projects, but also performed constant translation-work, as we all came from rather diverse academic and professional backgrounds, ranging from

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