Ethnographies of Translation: An Overview

Conférence donnée en anglais par Peter Flynn, professeur à la KU Leuven, Belgique
le mercredi 3 décembre à 18h15 en salle M1170 (1^er étage d’Uni Mail)

Résumé de la conférence :
Translation Studies researchers have recognised the versatility of ethnography as an approach to and research method for exploring translation practices in the broadest sense, in such diverse areas as medical interpreting (Angelelli 2000), asylum seeker procedures (Inghilleri 2003), translation at the European Commission and Parliament (Koskinen 2008) and literary translation (Flynn 2007). The number of studies using an ethnographic approach has increased considerably in recent years. Translation scholars have also studied translation practices in classical and more recent ethnographies from a Translation Studies perspective (Sturge 1997, 2007; Bachmann Medick 2006). As such translation has been part of the ethnographic exercise from the outset both as a practice and as a metaphor (Sturge 2007), as doing ethnography means researching communities and groups who speak other languages than those spoken by the community the researcher is reporting to. Malinowski’s notion of “context of situation” for example, stems directly from an awareness of the complexity involved in translating and hence representing other cultures, (Malinowski 1935). Ethnographers’ awareness of the problematic role played by translation in meaning-making, and especially in representing other cultures, has been the subject of longstanding debate potently crystallised in the work of Clifford and Marcus (1986).

The purpose of this lecture is to provide an outline of some basic aspects of and assumptions underlying an ethnography of translation and to illustrate these aspects by drawing on data, both recent and not so recent, collected while researching translation in a “community” of translators and in the neighbourhood.