Rosario Martín Ruano, University of Salamanca
Institutional discourse often depicts translation as an activity of prime importance in the development of healthy multicultural and diverse societies, as a safeguard of the egalitarian ideals multilingualism purportedly guarantees –i.e., ensuring the sameness of languages and citizens before the institution and before the law, and recognizing, respecting and enhancing language and cultural difference (Wagner et al 2002; Sosoni 2005). However, it well may be the case that, in the prevailing globalized, asymmetrically multicultural order, long-standing legal and institutional translation practices may be contributing, albeit involuntarily, to engendering or perpetuating unequal relations of hegemony and subordination between dominant cultures and powers, and minorized languages and identities.
In this paper, the objectives and some of the desired outcomes of the VIOSIMTRAD research project (2016-2020) will be presented in relation to legal and institutional translation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theories, the project “Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Society” enquires into the manner in which translation participates, never innocently, in the transcultural negotiation of identities, and, more specifically, into the subtle mechanisms through which translation often aligns itself with patterns of institutionalised subordination that result in symbolic violence and its “minorizing” of certain identities.
The paper will enlist a number of factors at work which accentuate translation’s potential proclivity to exercise symbolic violence in our day and age: dominant (monolingual, centripetal) language ideologies promoting uniformity to the detriment of diversity, prevailing professional narratives and ethos constructing legal and institutional translators as conduits or conveyors of expert knowledge and not problematizing their roles as builders of particular models of social and cultural orders, the revival of literalism fostered by existing codes of ethics and by increasingly automated translation practices and the impact of the pivotal role of English and its influence over minorized languages in the communicative fluxes of our global era.
The paper will explore the relevance of “recognition” for research, practice and training purposes in the field of legal and institutional translation as an alternative to translation practices inspired by an “ethics of sameness” (Venuti 1998), which, under the lens of symbolic violence, may prove to be accomplices of the exclusion, invisibilization, dehumanizing and/or stereotyping of certain identities. This concept explored by authors including Taylor (1994), Honneth (1995), Fraser (2002), and Fraser and Honneth (2003), which has promoted a paradigm shift in the field of political theory, may contribute to a definition of legal and institutional translation as a complex process of recognition and negotiation of identitarian differences, as well as to the articulation of alternative (post-foundational, diversity-sensitive) legal and institutional translation practices.
References:
Fraser, Nancy (2002) “Recognition without ethics”. In S. Lash, and M. Featherstone (eds) Recognition and Difference: Politics, Identity, Multiculture. London: Sage, 20-42.
Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth (2003) Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (J. Golb, J. Ingram and C. Wilke, trans.). London: Verso.
Honneth, Axel (1995) The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (J. Anderson, trans). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sosoni, Vielmeni (2005) “Multilingualism in Europe: Blessing or Curse?” In A. Branchadell and M. L. West (eds.) Less Translated Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 39-47.
Taylor, Charles (1994) “The Politics of Recognition”. In A. Gutmann (ed), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 25-73.
Venuti, Lawrence (1998). The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference. London/Nueva York: Routledge.
Wagner, Emma; Svend Bech; Jesús Martínez (2002) Translating for the European Institutions. Manchester: St Jerome.