Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Outline for a sociology of translation 95Transcending a merely inter-textual problematic that is centered on the relationbetween an original and its translation leads to a series of specifically sociologicalquestions about the stakes and functions of translations, their agenciesand agents, the space in which they are situated and the constraints, both politicaland economic, that circumscribe them. A sociological approach to translationmust therefore take into account several aspects of the conditions of transnationalcirculation of cultural goods: firstly, the structure of the field of international culturalexchanges; secondly, the type of constraints – political and economic – thatinfluence these exchanges; and thirdly, the agents of intermediation and the processesof importing and receiving in the recipient country (Heilbron and Sapiro2002a, 2002b).The international fieldConsidered as a transnational transfer, translation first presupposes a space of internationalrelations, this space being constituted by the existence of nation-statesand linguistic groups linked to each other by relations of competition and rivalry.The sociology of translation can thus be inscribed more generally within the programproposed by Pierre Bourdieu (2002) on the social conditions of the internationalcirculation of cultural goods. To understand the act of translating, oneshould in a first stage analyse it as embedded within the power relations amongnational states and their languages. These power relations are of three types – political,economic and cultural – the latter split into two aspects: the power relationsbetween linguistic communities as assessed by the number of primary andsecondary speakers (de Swaan 1993, 2001), and the symbolic capital accumulatedby different countries within the relevant field of cultural production (Casanova1999). In these power relations, the means of political, economic and culturalstruggles are unequally distributed. Cultural exchanges are therefore unequal exchangesthat express relations of domination. In accordance with these analyses,the flows of translations should then be re-situated in a transnational field characterizedby the power relations among national states, their languages, and theirliteratures.The global system of translations may be described as a set of highly hierarchizedrelations whose functioning demonstrates several general mechanisms(Heilbron 1999; Heilbron, de Nooy and Tichelaar 1995). Drawing on statisticaldata concerning the international market for translated books (acknowledgingthat the data suffer from various deficiencies; Pym 1998: 72), the structure ofthese exchanges can be described in a general way. Crudely speaking, since halfthe books translated worldwide are translations from English, English occupies