Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Translations “in the making” 139(2004–2007) 4 is provided by the following Montréal-based companies: Fides,Boréal and Les Allusifs. Created in 1937 with an originally religious focus, Fidesis one of Québec’s oldest book publishers. Nowadays, it has a more generalist orientationand has released approximately 80 titles per year over the past ten years,including essays, fiction, children’s literature, coffee-table books and referenceworks. Translations account for 11% of the titles published. Founded in the earlysixties, Les éditions du Boréal is another well-established Québec literary publishinghouse. It has a team of some 10 full-time employees (as well as three personsworking as subcontractors on sales and promotion) and releases around 70 titlesper year. Initially specializing in Québec literature and historical writing, Boréalreleased its first translation in the late 1970s but only started to produce a numberof translations – on a modest but more regular basis – in the 1990s. Since then,most of the translations produced under this imprint (an average of five per yearuntil 2005, when 15 foreign titles were released) have been works by Canadianauthors in the form of fiction and essays. Les Allusifs is a much smaller and morerecently created (2001) company releasing around 10 titles per year. Its catalogueis composed mainly of translations (around 75% of the titles released so far) andauthors from Africa, South America and Eastern and Western Europe writingin many different languages. The editorial line favours short novels (novellas) byauthors who enjoy literary recognition in their domestic market and who write, ina studied and polished literary style, stories dealing with usually dark issues (e.g.dictatorship, colonization, death).In studying one particular translation project in each of the three publishinghouses, I am working with three types of data. The first is the discursive type. Thesedata consist of comments collected during interviews with the actors participatingin the translation project: the managing director, editor-in-chief, translator(s),reviser(s), press officer(s), representative, etc. To analyse – over and above thediscourse – the practices themselves, I also collected two kinds of written data:(1) different versions of the translation corresponding to the distinct phases of itsdevelopment; (2) materials pertaining to management of the translation project(contractual documents, correspondence between the participants, limited-distributionpromotional brochures). In short, it is a matter of gathering the traces ofthe text in the act of becoming and of the paratext prior to publication. Lastly, thethird type of data involves the research notes taken throughout the process: fol-. This program, entitled Traductologie in the making and funded by the Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada, is linked to another three-year program, entitled “Traductionet réseaux: le rôle des intermédiaires dans le processus de fabrication d’une traductionen contexte éditorial” and funded by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture.