Esperança Bielsa

Translation in Global News

The mass media are of paramount importance in the formulation and transmission of messages about key developments of global significance, such as terrorism and the war in Iraq, yet the key mediating role of translation in the reception of speeches and addresses of figures like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein has remained largely invisible. Incorporating the results of extensive fieldwork in key global news organizations such as Reuters, Agence France Press and Inter Press Service, this book addresses central issues relating to the new pressures on translation arising from globalization, analyzing new texts from major news agencies as well as alternative media organizations. Co-written by Susan Bassnett, a leading figure in the field of translation studies, this book presents close readings of different English versions of key Arabic texts circulated in Western media to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural and religious Other is framed in different media.

Translation and the International Circulation of Literature: A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Roberto Bolaño's Work in Spanish and English

Abstract This article analyzes the reception of Roberto Bolaño’s novels in Spanish and English from a comparative perspective, in the context of debates about the role of translation in a highly unequal global literary field. Departing from Casanova’s theorization of the ‘world republic of letters’ and tracing the main factors that have shaped the translation of Latin America into English, it focuses on Bolaño’s case through an analysis of newspaper reviews published in Spain, Britain and the US. Issues discussed include the periodization of the reception of Bolaño’s literature, the proliferation of divergent biographical narratives around Bolaño, and the degree of interconnection between the literary and journalistic fields at the transnational level. Bolaño’s case illustrates the importance of translation in the universal consecration of his work and the central role played by the US in this process. It also points to the US’s increasingly significant role in the global consecration of autonomous works and not just, as Casanova would claim, of commercial culture, and identifies some key limitations of theories that understand cultural globalization in terms of homogenization or Americanization.

Cosmopolitanism as Translation

Whereas globalization theory was predominantly silent about the role of translation in making possible the flow of information worldwide, assuming instant communicability and transparency, translation has gained central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism that emphasize global interdependence and the negotiation of difference. In this context, a specification of translation processes provides a way of analysing the form in which interactions between different modernities take place and of specifying a notion of cosmopolitanism as internalization of the other. This article approaches translation as much more than the linguistic transfer of information from one language to another. Widely defined as the experience or the test of the foreign, a process which mobilizes our whole relationship to the other, translation appears as a material, concrete practice through which cosmopolitanism, conceived as openness to the world and to others, can be empirically examined. After having thus identified the central role of translation in a cosmopolitan context, the article examines how it can be used to approach current notions of aesthetic or artistic cosmopolitanism with reference to the key notion of world literature. Finally, it outlines the most important implications that a conception of cosmopolitanism as translation has for cosmopolitan social theory.

Homecoming as displacement: An analysis from the perspective of returning social scientists

International mobility is a growing phenomenon in which academicians are highly represented. While studies on transnationalism have widely focused on the mobility of people in terms of migrancy and exile, homecoming has been much less studied. This article contributes to filling this gap by analysing the homecoming experiences of three social scientists who have coincided in a Catalan university. The narrative of their personal trajectories and experiences of return allows for an understanding of homecoming in relation to wider discourses of mobility in the context of globalization. Contrary to dominant beliefs, homecoming is approached not as a return to one’s origins, but as a movement that implies dislocation and displacement and puts the homecomer in a position that is, in important ways, not essentially dissimilar to that of the stranger. The authors argue that the study of homecoming sheds light on certain neglected aspects of contemporary globalization, such as the existential limits to the international mobility of people or the favouring of local attachments over global options combined with the prevalence of cosmopolitan orientations. The article also calls attention to the cultural transfers of returnees to their countries of origin as well as to their world-making activities.

Politics of translation: A cosmopolitan approach

ABSTRACTTranslation has gained a central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism that emphasise global interdependence and the interaction between different cultures and traditions. In this context, it becomes necessary to formulate a politics of translation that questions some idealist assumptions about translation that are present in the sociological literature, specifies translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act, and formulates relevant strategies to confront this inherent ethnocentrism in order to open up translation to the difference of the other. This implies a broad conception of translation primarily as a social relation with foreignness, rather than merely as the transfer of meaning from one language into another. In this light, a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality is seen as a more realistic alternative than Derrida’s notion of absolute hospitality, while also responding to problems related to the difficulty of understanding, which are minimised in a Habermasi...

Theodor W. Adorno’s homecoming

Theodor Adorno has often been portrayed as the prototypical example of the permanent exile, even though, after living fifteen years in Britain and the US, he returned to Germany in 1949 and spent the last twenty years of his life there. This article traces Adorno’s reflections on his homecoming and analyses how his experiences of exile and return shaped his mature thought. Conceiving homecoming not simply as a return to one’s origins but as a continuation of a radical experience of the foreign, it builds on the remarkable continuity of Adorno’s theory of intellectual experience over time. The article also explores homecoming in relation to Adorno’s thought on language and translation, an aspect that has been little studied in the existing literature, both in terms of the articulation of a philosophy of language where the foreign plays an important role, and in terms of how language and translation were directly connected with Adorno’s return.