Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Between sociology and history 191ary models and methods out of which translation studies started developing ascientific approach to its object? I would suggest that there is not one such bodyof antecedent scholarly practices to translation studies but several – linguistics,semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history to name but the most obvious– which in itself may not be very different from the case of other socialsciences before it, except that, unlike other specializations officially recognizedtoday in the various institutional bodies regulating academic life, the aggregateformed by those previous disciplinary formations has not resulted in a coherent,semi-autonomous body of knowledge specific to the study of translation. It doesnot mean that it will not happen, but it has not succeeded yet.Therefore, it is of some importance to try and understand why, thirty yearsor so after the introduction of the label “translation studies” and despite the establishmentof not only professional but scholarly organizations, regional andworldwide, and a fair number of proposals intended to put some order in thediversity of research practices attested in the field (most prominently the excellentWilliams and Chesterman 2002), there remains no commonly accepted methodcomparable to the “historical method” or the sociologist’s method or métier, orprinciples of understanding of the kind developed by linguists who moulded theirdefinition of “language” into a category that had nothing to do with the commonsenseuse of the word. It is against this constructed background that it maybe useful, at this point in the evolution of our own area of knowledge development,to reflect on earlier examples of disciplinary formations, both to learn fromtheir past difficulties and to become more aware of our own specificity. I havealready written on those issues (Simeoni 2004) regarding the relations between (i)the way the “language of translation” has tended to be understood by practisingtranslators and by theoreticians of that language, and (ii) the basis upon whichthe science of linguistics developed at the end of the nineteenth century. In thefirst section of this paper, I reflect in a similar way on the cases of sociology andits former competing model, history, and their mutual maturing in relation toeach other. It may be from such a combination of former practices that translationstudies may find a solid substrate for its future development. The focus ofthis section therefore, is not strictly on current attempts by Translation scholarsto develop a sociological approach to facts of translation that could be amenableto translation studies as it has evolved but, more indirectly, to offer some thoughtson the history of two disciplines with longer standing which, sometimes, seem toappropriate the object of translation studies without paying much attention to thebody of knowledge developed on the subject by TS scholars. The intent, therefore,is to contribute a preliminary reflection on the place of translation studies in thehuman sciences. For this reason, the argument developed in these pages is, inevitably,more conceptual than documentary. Which explains the limited number of