The Politics of Translation

Call for Papers

The Politics of Translation

We are pleased to invite translation scholars and researchers worldwide to contribute research papers to an edited volume, provisionally titled 

The Politics of Translation

The proposed volume will be considered for publication as an edited volume in ‘New Trends in Translation Studies’ to be published by Peter Lang (Oxford).

Interested contributors are requested to submit to the volume editors: Ali Almanna and Juliane House a title, abstract and a brief bio sketch of author/s at the earliest (latest by 30^th April 2021).  They can send it to alialmanna9@gmail.com 

Once accepted by editors, the first draft of the chapter (approx. 6000 words) will be due by 1^st July 2021. These chapters will be then peer-reviewed before submitting to the publisher. The volume will be published in February, 2022.

Objectives

Events are produced, reproduced and even shaped through translation. The same event might be interpreted, and accordingly, represented differently by different people (be they translators, editors, revisers, translation quality controllers, translation managers, etc.) according to their accumulated value systems, beliefs, assumptions, backgrounds, senses of belonging and societal commitments. Texts are then framed in these agents’ minds in ways that promote the rise of “competing narratives, with important implications for different parties to the conflict” (Baker 2006: 107). As such, translation does not refer to the act of transferring the forging materials from language/culture A to language/culture B, but rather different versions of truth and reality are reflected, (re)produced, enacted, mediated, (re)constructed, (re)framed, (re)narrated and even manipulated and contested in the process. As major agents in the interlingual and intercultural communication process, translators and interpreters are often not ideologically neutral. Rather, they are sometimes motivated by different factors to step with a view to mediating in the process, thereby conceptualising the final product as a kind of discourse. With this in mind, translation and interpreting is looked upon as a political activity closely related to such issues as ideology, power, agency, identity and representation.

This current volume aims at addressing such topics as ideology, power, discourse, identity and representation; therefore, it welcomes submissions involving different language combinations and from a wide range of sociopolitical, cultural and institutional contexts. Potential submissions can be from various theoretical perspectives and draw on different methodological approaches.

Some of the relevant topics might include but are not limited to the following (theoretical insights and methodologies):

• Translation/interpreting and (critical) discourse analysis
• Translation/interpreting and narrative theory
• Translation/interpreting and systemic functional linguistics
• Translation/interpreting and ideology
• Translation/interpreting and framings
• Translation/interpreting and power relations
• Corpus-based critical discourse analysis

More specific topics might include:

• The (re)presentation of various sociopolitical actors in translation and interpreting
• Interpreter and translator’s and interpreting agency and ideology mediation
• The (re)narration of (different) versions of fact, truth and reality (e.g. news and social media)
• The discursive (re)construction ofSelfversus Other and Us versus Them in translation and interpreting
• The discursive enactment of identity (e.g. national identity and group identities) in translation and interpreting
• Translation and interpreting as means of subjugation and/or resistance
• Translation/interpreting, power, international relations and global order
• Critical points in translation and interpreting

Editors

Ali Almanna is series editor of Routledge Studies in Arabic Translation (London/New York) and Associate Professor of Translation at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. He obtained his PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Durham (UK) and MA in Translation Studies from Westminster University (UK). His recent publications include The Routledge Course in Translation Annotation (Routledge), Semantics for Translation Students (Peter Lang), The Nuts and Bolts of Arabic-English Translation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), The Arabic-English Translator as Photographer (Routledge), Re-Framing Realities through Translation (Peter Lang), Translation as a Set of Frames (Routledge) in addition to many articles published in peer reviewed journals.

Juliane House is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at Hamburg University, founding member of the German Science Foundation’s Research Centre on Multilingualism and Director of the PhD in Applied Linguistics at Hellenic American University in its Athens campus. Her research interests include contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, politeness, translation, English as a global lingua franca, and intercultural communication. Her book publications include ‘A Model for Translation Quality Assessment’, ‘Interlingual and Intercultural Communication’, ‘Cross-Cultural Pragmatics’, ‘Misunderstanding in Social Life’, ‘Translation’, ‘Multilingual Communication’, ‘Translation as Communication across   Languages and Cultures’ and ‘Translation. The Basics’.