Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

9Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapirotion itself, from a “hermeneutic movement” (Steiner 1975: 296–303) that aimsat gaining access to the “meaning” of the text and to its uniqueness. By contrast,cultural studies, in accordance with a relativist conception, insist on the variousmodes of appropriating texts, on the instability of their meaning, and on the mutualpermeability of cultures. Both kinds of analyses, however, set aside the socialconditions of the interpretative act, which amounts to ignoring the plurality ofimplicated agents, as well as the effective functions that translations might fulfil,both for the translator and for various mediators, as well as for the readerships intheir historical and social spaces of reception.The economic approach, more powerful socially but much less widespreadwithin studies on translation, performs a reduction that is somewhat the contrary.In opposition to the obsession with a text’s singularity and the uniqueness of itsauthor, the economic approach assimilates translated books into the most generalcategory of goods, identifying them as merchandise produced, distributed andconsumed according to the logic of national and international markets. But toconsider translated books as commodities like any other occults the specificity ofcultural goods as well as the modalities specific to their production and marketing.The market of symbolic goods is a specific type of economy that functionsaccording to its own criteria of valuation (Bourdieu 1977, 1993).Breaking with both these reductive and opposite approaches, a proper sociologicalanalysis embraces the whole set of social relations within which translationsare produced and circulated. In this respect, it is closely affiliated to two relatedresearch areas developed by comparativists, historians of literature and specialistsin cultural and intellectual history: translation studies, and studies of culturaltransfer. Appearing in the 1970s in small and often multilingual countries (Israel,Belgium, Netherlands), translation studies managed to displace the problematic.Rather than analysing translation solely or principally in relation to an original,whether source-text or source-language, or inversely, encompassing them in thevague notion of cultural hybridization, as happens in Cultural Studies, this newresearch domain was interested in questions about the functioning of translationsin their contexts of production and reception, that is to say, in the target culture(Holmes, Lambert and Lefevere 1978; Even-Zohar 1990; Toury 1995). The questionof the relation between the contexts of production and reception also underpinsthe historical study of “cultural transfers”, which investigates the role of theagents in these exchanges, both institutions and individuals, and their inscriptionin the political and cultural relations between the countries involved (Espagneand Werner 1990–1994). The development of comparative cultural history hasgiven rise to reflection and debate on a suitable way of articulating a comparativeapproach with the analysis of transfers (Charle 1996; Espagne 1999: 35–49).