Distributing and performing translation/interpreting either reinforce or resist social structures
What is it about?
Translating and interpreting are social acts and create social experiences. In so doing, they shape and reshape relations between social agents, and reinforce or resist social structures. The book explores how translation and interpretation uphold, weave, contest, and refashion power structures, between locals and strangers, human and non-human beings. The contexts under scrutiny in the book include refugee crises, social work, multinational companies, engineering companies, institution-citizen communication, postcolonial literary systems, dictatorship regimes. By revealing the very foundations of asymmetrical power relations, the book offers a window onto social power practices and structures and the role of translation and interpreting in their state and (possible) evolution.
Why is it important?
The myth of neutrality looms large on translation and interpreting practices. Practitioners and, most importantly, users need to awake to how the mere provision of translation and interpreting impacts social experiences and structures, and how the strategies to deliver and perform translation and interpreting can reshape cultures, worldviews, practices. In a world that needs to manage its diversity and where the make-believe of monolingualism and homogeneity continues to be motivated by social asymmetries, this collective endeavor can make a difference and lead us to the truly postmonolingual ideology that celebrates difference.