Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

188 Daniel Simeoniapparent in English-speaking countries and in other places around the world thanin continental Europe. It is in a European context after all that novel approaches totranslation were able to develop in the late 1990s in ways that made it amenable tothe sociological discipline. Furthermore, where signs of interest for sociologicaltheory have turned up in translation studies in places other than Europe, it wasoften at the instigation of scholars originally trained and active in, or with strongpersonal connections to the European tradition. Finally, the sociological modelsthat have inspired this renewal of interest were derived from European works, inparticular, the kind of social thought associated with the works of Pierre Bourdieuand Norbert Elias.This contextualization provides a key to exploring differences of appreciationand judgment in the increasingly varied scholarly work developing here and therein the international field of translation studies. Among the most apparent dividestoday is the one between, on the one hand, an aggregate of European practices ofscholarship (whatever differences exist internally among them) and, on the other,the vast expanse of work developing elsewhere, impelled by the extraordinarypressures brought about by the spread of the cultural studies movement on NorthAmerican campuses and, outward from there, wherever world Englishes prevail:Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Hong Kong etc. and, in part, England. Inthis particular geopolitical context, virtually all disciplines – history, anthropology,political science, geography etc., as well as the academic study of translation– have incorporated elements of the cultural studies movement. Mappingthat circulation of ideas and the resulting practices in terms of the methods beingused is not easy, but it is an indispensable step on the long and winding road ofconceptualizing translation as an original object of study. For one thing, the institutionalmap does not coincide with the more complex positions of scholars activein those institutions. Secondly, it is always questionable to rationalize differencesamong scholarly ways of thinking in terms of aggregates, whether in termsof national or in larger, regional blocks. The risk is great also to see a return to essentialismin such homogenized groupings. But this is no reason why a comparativeanalysis should not be attempted along those lines, in order to make sense ofthe different approaches to method in our field. Ideally, we would obtain a kindof Homo academicus of translation studies, applicable beyond national fields. Themap need not be fixed. Indeed, it constantly evolves.Meanwhile, to understand the logic behind those intellectual linkages andruptures, I have found it useful to think in terms of “scholarly localisms”. Consistently,the history of disciplines in the English-speaking world has differed fromthat of their continental European counterparts. With the English language nowachieving status of lingua franca, we might think that a convergence of sorts is