The sociology of translation: outline of an emerging field

Esperança Bielsa Mialet

doi:10.6035/monti.2010.2.8

Abstract

This article explores the emerging field of the sociology of translation, focusing especially on two key areas: literary translation and news translation. While literary translation is a major area in translation studies, news translation has until recently received relatively little attention. It is argued that a sociological input to the study of both literary and news translation reveals not only important aspects of the social context in which translation occurs and contributes to a renewed understanding of the field, but also makes translation studies relevant to other disciplines, in particular sociology and globalisation research.

Highlights

Resum L’article revisa el camp emergent de la sociologia de la traducció, amb un èmfasi especial en dues àrees clau: la traducció literària i la traducció periodística
It is argued that a sociological input to the study of both literary and news translation reveals important aspects of the social context in which translation occurs that have remained largely unexamined, and helps to elucidate the function of translation in the global literary and news fields
The discipline of translation studies, which has increasingly come to adopt sociological approaches for the study of intercultural relations and, on the other, the work of a strand of French sociology influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to the sociology of culture, which explicitly focuses on the social nature of translation and its place in the field of cultural production

Summary

Introduction

Resum L’article revisa el camp emergent de la sociologia de la traducció, amb un èmfasi especial en dues àrees clau: la traducció literària i la traducció periodística. Anglo-American sociology has been consistently blind to the important role translation plays in the discipline, both in mediating the international circulation of theory and in key methodological aspects of social research, a lack of interest that can in part be explained as a product of current global inequalities and the dominant position of the Anglo-American academy in the world.

Results

Conclusion