Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Between sociology and history 189taking place. Instead, we can observe distinct, still largely regional traditions hidingbehind the dominant, ubiquitous use of English.There is an abundance of signs that such scholarly localism exists in the internationalfield of scholarship, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.Localisms may have flexible borders – “provincialism” is a relative notion – buttheir power of attraction is undisputable. How could it be otherwise? The oppositewould mean that, by some miraculous stroke of luck, scholars are immune tothe determinations that bear on what might be called the subjects of their investigationsand which they profess to unveil. Translation studies is no exception.For example: the massive contribution of a particular group of Tel Aviv scholarsto the field is likely to be less spontaneously recognized outside the continentalEuropean tradition (see e.g. Trivedi 2005). No doubt the genealogy of polysystemicsplayed a role in provoking those differing appreciations. I am thinkingof the still largely undiscussed assumptions among that group of Israeli scholarsregarding the positive part played by nation states in the institution of translation,or the fact that the genealogy in question can be traced to a small number ofEuropean scholars outside translation studies, at a time when the establishmentand achievements of modern nation states were looked upon in a generally favourablelight. Such imaginary constructions as nineteenth-century nation stateswere being seriously questioned when translation studies developed – simultaneouslywith the new cultural history, cultural studies, women’s studies, as well asa considerably revamped anthropology. But the ways in which those “new” areasof study crystallized out of the cradle of former disciplines were clearly markedby the personal and regional histories of the individual scholars who, in so doing,gave impetus to the global paradigmatic change taking place in the human sciences.Many among that group viewed themselves at the time as children of theEnlightenment.In this context, to envisage the contribution that sociology can make to thefield of translation studies is an open invitation to a discussion of method. “Method”is understood here as a body of scholarly practices, inherited – consciouslyor not – from the traditional disciplines. Both the historical method and the sociologicalmethod emerged in the nineteenth-century in relation to one another,antagonistically. Or rather, the sociological method developed out of, against certainpractices of inquiry that had been the preserve of the historian. Not only that,but for eighty-odd years, a dispute prevailed between the representatives of eachdiscipline as to which was more “scientific” in its approach of social phenomena.The nineteenth-century historians who inherited the practices of inquiry ofphilologists and antiquarians of earlier times were first to impose their disciplineas a model of truth-oriented research in what would later become known as socialscience. Primary documents, not secondary sources, provided the test case