Description
A Translational Sociology provides an interdisciplinary investigation of the key role of translation in society. There is a growing recognition of translation’s intervention in the intellectual history of sociology, in the international reception of social theory, and in approaches to the global literary and academic fields. This book brings attention to aspects of translation that have remained more elusive to sociological interpretation and analysis, investigating translation’s ubiquitous presence in the everyday lives of ordinary people in increasingly multilingual societies and its key intervention in mediating politics within and beyond the nation.
In order to challenge a reductive view of translation as a relatively straightforward process of word substitution that is still prevalent in the social sciences, this book proposes and develops a broader definition of translation as a social relation across linguistic difference, a process of transformation that leaves neither its agent nor its object unchanged. The book offers elaborations of the social, cultural and political implications of such an approach, as a broad focus on these various perspectives and their interrelations is needed for a fuller understanding of translation’s significance in the contemporary world.
This is key reading for advanced students and researchers of translation studies, social theory, cultural sociology and political sociology.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Translation and society
Chapter 1. Translation and identity
Chapter 2. Translation and transformation
Chapter 3. For a translational sociology
Part II. Translation and politics
Chapter 4. Politics of translation
Chapter 5. Translating democracy
Chapter 6. The translator as producer
Part III. Translation and experience
Chapter 7. Translation and modernity: Benjamin’s Baudelaire
Chapter 8. Translating strangers
Chapter 9. Homecoming: an auto-analysis
Conclusion: translation and reflexivity
General bibliography
Index
