Search

Translation is a complex phenomenon that can be studied from many angles, of which editor Juliane House focusses on four, namely translating as a linguistic-textual operation, as intercultural comm...

The article aims to identify the sources of disunity between different usages of ‘institutional translation’ and to propose a clarifying foundation for the concept. It argues that the core function of institutions as regulatory organizational systems is to govern, and in a multilingual environment they can and often do employ translation in performing their governing function. In that case, they govern by translation. To better understand the nature of government by translation, the concepts of governance, governing and governmentality are discussed; Meylaerts' model of translational options in multilingual governance is applied to governing, and a tentative model of the translation regimes (maintenance, regulation, implementation and identity work) is designed.

This article looks at the municipality of Tampere (Swedish: Tammerfors), an industrial inland city in southern Finland. The patterns of multilingual interaction within this geographic space are traced, paying special attention to the historical trajectories of translationality. This rereading of the history of Tampere (with particular emphasis on the period 1809–1917) focuses on translational events – that is, moments of overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers in written or spoken communicative situations in which more than one language is involved. Translational actions are found to take many forms, ranging from highly prominent and visible interpreting to everyday self-translation. What remains constant during the period under study is a sense of parallel existence of languages and mutual accommodation to the linguistic needs of a multilingual community, even in the face of conflicting interests and changing power relations.

This article describes a case study where students of an MA-level research methods course were invited to engage in a participatory learning experience in the spirit of critical pedagogy. During the course, the matrix originally designed by Michael Burawoy to describe the four fields of sociology (professional, critical, policy and public sociology) was presented and adapted to translation studies. The notion of public translation studies was then used to enhance the students’ awareness of the dialogic possibilities of research to engage with different publics. This engagement was put into practice in a small-scale assignment designed both to introduce fieldwork methods and to bring the students’ lived experiences into the classroom for discussion and debate. The framework of critical pedagogy and public translation studies was found to offer many opportunities to resist the marketization and commodification forces currently shaping contemporary university education. It also offered an empowering ...

When applied to the practice of translating for the European institutions, several central concepts of translation studies are seen in a different light. Work at these institutions reveal unexpected complexities which have implications for translation theory. Researching EU translation can thus be used as a test case against which to measure and refine the theoretical apparatus of translation theory. At the same time, research can support practice by providing a theoretically informed global view of the everyday work of EU translators. In this article, my aim is to instigate critical interaction between translation theory and the practice of EU translation. Taking a closer look at some central concepts, such as source and target texts and cultures, the notion of equivalence, and translators ‘ visibility, I wish to indicate some avenues for future research.

To understand the task of translators it is essential to take into account the institutional constraints affecting their work. The Translation Service of the Commission of the European Union (EU), the largest translation agency in the world, offers plenty of material to analyze the assumptions and expectations related to translation. Two important themes in EU translation are (the illusions of) equality and equivalence: the main purpose of the massive translation system is to safeguard the equal status of all official languages, and the cornerstone of the translation policy is the equal value of all language versions. In the EU context, equivalence is therefore not a qualitative requirement but an a priori characteristic of all translations, regardless of other qualities these translations might have. The equivalence relation not only exists between the source text and the translation but is automatically extended to link various translations of the same text. In practice, the notion of equivalenc...