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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Candace Séguinot One of the questions raised in the Call for Papers is
how “training, teaching and research'” can respond to future needs for
translation. This paper will look at some of the changes that are currently
taking place in the field and the problems that some of these changes pose
for the relationship between research and education.
Panel 1: Disciplinary Identity: Redefining Translation in the
21st Century
Translation Studies: the Individual and the Collective
York University, Toronto, Canada
The goal of training in a professional field is to prepare individuals to be
acceptable to a collective. In the case of translation, the collective is
not the aggregate of ultimate users of the language service, but the
institutions and agencies that control or influence the market for
translation, interpretation, media transfer, and localization. When market
forces or political constraints are local, the form that translation
training takes is local. The idea that professional translators only work
into their mother tongue, for example, was a given in translator training in
Canada, but made no sense in the training of people who could provide
services to the multilingual refugee populations of Australia or for
training translators in countries like Finland where much of the translation
work is into world as opposed to official languages.
With the globalization of markets, the cultural interests that drove public
intervention in the translation market became subject to competition from
the needs of private enterprise and new political alliances. Canada, as an
example of the culturally-based system, had and to some extent still has,
parallel programmes for its two official languages in bilingual university
programmes in translation, irrespective of market needs. The alignment of
post-secondary education in Europe is an example of the latter trend, the
teaching of Japanese in Finnish schools of translation the former.
The goal of a liberal arts education, on the other hand, is to help the
individual develop intellectual skills. The more class time goes to
preparing a student for the pragmatics of the workplace, the less there is
for the reflective aspects of translation studies. The translation industry
is restructuring. Out-sourcing, the first step, meant that graduates
couldn’t count on being revised. Now there is a move to download the
administrative costs of managing freelance translators by establishing
long-term relationships with agencies. This, coupled with the corollary to
global marketing that texts are now being published in more languages,
favours the one-stop shopping approach. It is not clear whether translation
programmes will see their mandate as enhancing entrepreneurial and
management skills in response. It looks as though in the medium term, before
the next leap in computer memory with its implication for unmediated
translation, there will continue to be a differentiation between
professionally oriented and research oriented translation studies.
© IATIS 2003