Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Outline for a sociology of translation 103factors, and depends on the functioning of its institutions: controls over printpublication, specialized book series, the editorial policy of each publishing company,the space of journals and periodicals, the modes of consecration (literaryprizes and awards), etc.In his article on the “social conditions of the international circulation of ideas”,Pierre Bourdieu, taking up Marx’s proposition, reminded us that “texts circulatewithout their context”, a fact which often generates misunderstandings (Bourdieu2002: 4). Reception is in part determined by the representations of the cultureof origin and by the status (majority or minority) of the language itself. Recipientsreinterpret translated texts as a function of the stakes prevailing in the fieldof reception. Translated works may be appropriated in diverse and sometimescontradictory ways, as a function of the stakes proper to the intellectual field ofreception (Pinto 1995; Kalinowski 1999).In a more general way, translation has multiple functions: an instrument ofmediation and exchange, it may also fulfil political or economic functions, andconstitute a mode of legitimation, in which authors as much as mediators may bethe beneficiaries. The value of translation does not depend only on the position oflanguages, but also on the positions of both translated authors and their translators,and each of them in both the national literary field and the global literaryspace (Casanova 2002). The translation into central languages constitutes a consecrationthat modifies the position of an author in his field of origin. Inversely, it isa mode of accumulation of literary capital for groups, such as German Romantics,and for national literatures in the course of being constituted, as is illustrated by thecase of translations into Hebrew in the 1920s: these translations aimed to create “anorganic readership” even though the community of Hebrew speakers was still verynarrow and the great majority of them spoke another language (Shavit 2002).One re-encounters this double function of translation at the level of bodiessuch as publishing houses and journals: while publishers endowed with significantliterary capital have a power to consecrate authors whom they translate, thetranslation is a means of accumulating symbolic power for a publisher lackingeconomic and cultural capital (Serry 2002). The strategies of authors represent alarge continuum of possibilities. Authors who are dominated in a dominant field,for example, may try to ameliorate their position by translating dominant authorsof dominated fields. Beginners or authors who have a relatively marginal position,are often tempted to translate promising but still unknown authors: one thinks ofLarbaud translating Joyce’s Ulysses, to name one canonical example. At the level ofmediators, too, the uses of translation vary from the consecration of the translatedauthor to the self-consecration of the translator (Kalinowski 2001).Finally, literary translation may play a role in the creation of collective identities.Literature, art, and music have played an important part in the creation of