Translation and political engagement

Abstract

Abstract The activist aspect of translation that has illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions is a sort of speech act that rouses, inspires, bears witness, mobilizes and incites to rebellion, actually participating in social movement and political change. In this way, translators are the producers of new knowledge signifying the assertion of power by choosing deliberately to subvert the traditional allegiance of translation and also interjecting their own world view and politics into their work, and these translators undertake the work they do because they believe the texts they produce will benefit humanity or impact positively upon the receptor culture in ways that are broadly ideological. This paper investigates the issue of an Islamic Marxist translators’ agency applying Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concepts (habitus, field, capital) in the socio-political context of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s. This study surveys how based on his habitus Ali Shariati, an Islamic Marxist translator and thinker, translated some texts to transfer new knowledge to society as cultural capital which intensified the initiation and facilitation of social reform and political change in Iran in the 1970s. The paper peruses some texts translated by Ali Shariati to show that he wielded his own politics in translation to illuminate Iranians’ thought against the imperial regime to stimulate them to subvert the Pahlavi dynasty.