Mona Baker

Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies

Part I (General) Entries include: central issues in translation theory (e.g. equivalence, translatability) terms which have a specific meaning in translation studies (e.g.imitation, paraphrase) various approaches to translation (e.g. linguistic perspective, interpretive approach) types of translation and interpreting (e.g. literary translation, dubbing, and signed language interpreting) Part II (History and Traditions) Entries include Russian, French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Finnish, and regions including Brazil, Canada and India.

Narratives of terrorism and security: ‘accurate’ translations, suspicious frames

Constructing and disseminating ‘knowledge’ about a number of communities and regions widely designated as a security threat is now a big industry. Much of this industry relies heavily on various forms of translation and, in some cases, is generated by a team of dedicated translators working on full-blown, heavily funded programmes that involve selecting, translating and distributing various types of text that emanate from Arab and Muslim countries: newspaper articles, film clips, transcripts of television shows, selected excerpts from educational material, sermons delivered in mosques. Drawing on narrative theory and using examples from institutions involved in constructing this type of knowledge, this article argues that attempts to discredit such efforts by questioning the ‘accuracy’ of individual translations miss the point. What is needed, instead, is a more nuanced understanding of the subtle devices used to generate dehumanising narratives of Arabs and Muslims through carefully planned and generously funded programmes of translation.

Reframing Conflict in Translation

This article draws on narrative theory and the notion of framing, the latter as developed in the literature on social movements, to explore various ways in which translators and interpreters accentuate, undermine or modify contested aspects of the narrative(s) encoded in the source text or utterance. Starting with an outline of the assumptions and strengths of a narrative framework compared with existing theories of translation, the article goes on to define the concept of framing in the context of activist discourse. It then outlines some of the sites—or points in and around the text—at which (re)framing may be achieved, and offers various examples of framing strategies used in written and screen translation. The examples are drawn from translations between English and Arabic in the context of the Middle East conflict and the so-called War on Terror, but the theoretical issues outlined are not language specific or context specific.

Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training

Abstract This introduction to the ITT special issue on Ethics and the Curriculum argues the need to engage more systematically with ethical issues in the context of translator and interpreter training, particularly in view of recent technological, social, political and professional developments that are yet to be explored in the literature in terms of ethical implications. The authors argue that accountability is now a key issue in all professions, and that the responsibility of translators and interpreters extends beyond clients to include the wider community to which they belong. In order for students to embrace this responsibility and develop an awareness of their impact on society, the classroom must be confgured as an open space for refection and experimentation. The article proposes types of activity that may be incorporated in the translation and interpreting curriculum in order to provide students with an opportunity to refect on ethical questions in their own work and in the work of other translators and interpreters and it outlines some of the challenges posed to educators in this context.

Interpreters and Translators in the War Zone: Narrated and Narrators

Abstract For reasons to do with the spread and intensity of armed conflicts since the early 1990s and the increased visibility of translators and interpreters that accompanied this development, scholars both within and outside translation studies have begun to engage with various aspects of the role and positioning of translators and interpreters in war zones. Drawing on available studies and recent media reports on contemporary conflicts, and adopting a narrative perspective to make sense of the findings, this article focuses on two issues. The first is how translators and interpreters are narrated by other participants in the war zone, including military personnel, war correspondents, mainstream media, alternative media and local populations. The second is how they themselves participate in elaborating the range of public narratives of the conflict that become available to us, and, in so doing, influence the course of the war in ways that are subtle, often invisible, but nevertheless extremely significant. The discussion is set within the broader context of recurrent, stock political narratives that constrain and define relationships and identities in all war contexts, and demonstrates that despite attempts to contain them within those narratives, translators and interpreters retain their agency and exercise their power in diverse ways.

Resisting State Terror: Theorizing Communities of Activist Translators and Interpreters

Since its inception, translation studies has arguably situated itself within structures of authority1 and continues to describe the role of translation largely from the point of view of dominant groups and constituencies.2 This s particularly evident in frameworks such as skopos theory, which prioritizes the role of the commissioner in a typically affluent industrial setting, and norm theory, which privileges mainstream values as realized in sanctioned, repeated patterns of behaviour. It is also evident in the overwhelming attention given to dominant Western and European communities in theorizing translation, notably Venuti’s focus on the Anglo-American context and feminist theorizing in North America. Where translation scholars have adopted the perspective of the colonized or of resistant groups in society, this has largely been in the context of historical studies, with temporal distance ensuring that no ’spillage’ of risk or serious political controversy can contaminate the orderly world of scholarly research.

Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action

This article examines the genesis, dynamics and positioning of activist groups of translators and interpreters who engage in various forms of collective action. The activism of these groups is distinctive in that they use their linguistic skills to extend narrative space and empower voices made invisible by the global power of English and the politics of language. They further recognise that language and translation themselves constitute a space of resistance, a means of reversing the symbolic order. Their use of hybrid language, their deliberate downgrading of English, the constant shuffling of the order and space allocated to different languages on their websites—all this is as much part of their political agenda as their linguistic mediation of texts and utterances produced by others, in their capacity as translators and interpreters. The article examines the positioning of these groups vis-à-vis what Tarrow (2006, p. 16) terms ‘the new generation of global justice activists’ on the one hand, and professional translators and interpreters on the other, and argues that they occupy a ‘liminal’ space between the world of activism and the service economy.

The treatment of variation in corpus-based translation studies

Abstract Corpus-based research in translation studies initially focused on similarities and differences between translated and non-translated text, in an attempt to demonstrate that translations form a distinctive textual system within any target culture. More recently, researchers have begun to turn their attention to the question of individual variation within any corpus of translations. This article focuses on the latter strand of investigation and presents two small-scale studies which highlight such variation: one based on material from the European Union and the other on a subset of literary texts in the Translational English Corpus. It ends with an overview of the features of individual variation discussed in the literature and argues that the next stage of development in corpus-based translation studies must address the challenge of elaborating robust models for the systematic analysis of stylistic variation across translators of both literary and non-literary text.

The Prefigurative Politics of Translation in Place-based Movements of Protest: Subtitling in the Egyptian Revolution

The idea of prefiguration is widely assumed to derive from anarchist discourse; it involves experimenting with currently available means in such a way that they come to mirror or actualise the political ideals that inform a movement, thus collapsing the traditional distinction between means and ends. Practically all the literature on prefiguration has so far focused on structural, organisational and interactional issues – specifically, how activist communities attempt to create in their own interactions and in the way they organise their work the kind of society they envision: non-hierarchical, non-representational, inclusive, respectful of diversity. This article explores the extent to which volunteer subtitling undertaken by disparate individuals for collectives connected with the Egyptian Revolution supports or undermines the prefigurative agendas of these collectives. In doing so, it tentatively extends the current definition of prefiguration to encompass textual, visual and aesthetic practices that prefigure activist principles and actualise them in the present, focusing in particular on the level of experimentation involved in such practices.

Ethics and the curriculum : critical perspectives

A number of translation scholars and educators have begun to argue that the training of translators and interpreters should include preparation not only for the market but also for society ? for the concrete ethical dilemmas that face translators and interpreters in real life. Scholars and educators alike, however, have yet to engage fully with issues such as how students might be alerted to potential ethical dilemmas and encouraged to reflect on them as part of their training;; how educators themselves might reflect on the ethics of teaching; and whether it is possible to elaborate an ethics that is specific to teaching translators and interpreters. With rare exceptions, mostly in the area of literary translation, translator and interpreter education has typically sidestepped these questions, and the issue of ethics in general. At most, students are made aware of existing professional codes of practice (often misleadingly referred to as codes of ethics). These tend to focus on the rights of the fee-paying client and stress the need for impartiality and fidelity, notwithstanding growing public concerns and debate over the rampant consumerism that has accompanied globalization in recent years.This special issue of the Interpreter and Translator Trainer provides a forum for reflection on questions of ethics in the context of translator and interpreter education. Covering a wide range of training contexts and types of translation and interpreting, contributors call for a radically altered view of the relationship between ethics and the translating and interpreting profession, a relationship in which ethical decisions can rarely, if ever, be made a priori but must be understood and taught as an integral and challenging element of one?s work.