Translation studies: An archipelago of differences

Abstract

Since its inception as a formally institutionalized discipline, translation studies (TS) has evolved and expanded immensely. It has undergone several turns (Snell-Hornby, 2006) and paradigm shifts (e.g. descriptive). Hence, many subfields claim to be part of the discipline: translation pedagogy, translation history, translation technologies, corpus-based translation studies, audiovisual translation, all sorts of interpreting, localization, multilingual terminology, genre translation, cognitive translation studies, descriptive and applied translation studies, translation quality assessment and management, in addition to women, gender and postcolonial translation studies, etc. The question that has always either underpinned or explicitly dominated discussions in various outlets of the discipline is not about the common denominator of all these subfields—which is obviously translation—but rather whether they are able to communicate, cooperate or even claim a common disciplinary belonging, given the diversity of the methodologies, approaches and perspectives on translation. An interesting book was published in 1998; it was entitled Translation Studies: Unity in Diversity? It is remarkable that the topic is still quite relevant nowadays, although the interrogative mode denotes a doubt about the viability or possibility of the proposed paradox. In fact, not only were there four editors of various backgrounds of that book, but the collection also gathered more than fifteen contributions, divided in five sections and scattered over ten different subfields of TS in order to “illustrate the capacity of translation studies to deal with a very diverse range of phenomena” and “counter the tendency to partition or exclude in translation studies” (Bowker et al., 1998: v–vi). Countering exclusion and divisions within the discipline because of our awareness as translators and translation scholars of what is to be marginalized; appealing to the duty of memory and faithfulness to common origins because of the heritage all TS scholars have to acknowledge; and “celebrating our differences” provided that we abstain from “denigrating the commonality of our concerns” (v–vi) are rather morally motivated arguments. In effect, despite the good intentions behind these programmatic announcements, they do not address, for example, the challenge and pressure of interdisciplinary collaborations and complementarity that is at the core of the issue of diversity within and without all the specialisms of today’s scholarly endeavour for knowledge development. To testify of everyone’s perspective from the various subfields of TS is not by default conducive to problematize the issue of their relationships (whether within or without) but rather simply expresses their coexistence almost in silos without any necessary attempt at learning or understanding some of the others’ field of expertise. Interdisciplinarity is defined as relational, even social in the first place: