Representation through translation: Shared maps of pragmatic meaning and the constructionist paradigm

Abstract

The paper intends to highlight the contribution of the notion of power to the pragmatic arsenal applicable to translation studies.The data derive from two political subgenres, in English-Greek translation, namely, (a) emotionally loaded journalistic discourse about mutual mass expulsion between Greece and Turkey and (b) academic political discourse.The paper examines translator behavior in two text samples and attempts to account for it in terms of a pragmatics toolkit encompassing psychological and functional approaches to translational phenomena. The paper further considers translation as an act of representation: it uses tenets of the constructionist paradigm to cater for aspects of the translation process which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Pragmatic and socio-cognitive aspects of language study merge with power-sensitive approaches to highlight practices of representation through translation at sites of conflict. Dominant representational paradigms activate shared maps of target language meaning-making, which we internalize in the process of socialization. The approach allows a theoretical perspective which advances the study of socio-pragmatic aspects of translation practice.