Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting

Book Preface

The Institute of Translation Studies, Charles University, Prague, organized its 10th International Conference on Translation and Interpreting in September 11–13 2003 under the name of “Translation Targets”. The papers in the present volume are a selection from those presented at the conference. The selection has been made so as to focus on social and cultural approaches, which emerged as a key area both in the course of the conference and in subsequent developments within Translation Studies.

The editors have sought to underscore the importance of addressing both written translation and interpreting in this regard. This is because some of the most striking developments in this field have taken place with respect to what is know as “community interpreting” or “public-service interpreting”. We thus include papers on the role of interpreters in heath services, immigration detention centers, and asylum hearings, for example, where contextual power relations are often more important than the mere rendering of texts. In placing those studies side-by-side with papers on more traditional areas, we would hope that the same questions might be asked across the board. For instance, if power asymmetries create ethical problems in asylum hearings, could they not also be factors in literary translation? Of course, such questions can also be asked in the reverse direction. For example, if cooperation and consensus can be found among the social agents involved in literary translation, can those concepts not also be applied to public-service interpreting? The answers to such questions might ultimately be negative. Yet Translation Studies should at least allow the questions to be asked.

The selection of the papers has not been designed to privilege any particular school or theory. We have instead looked for a very wide range of translation and interpreting situations, with a common set of underlying problems concerning sociocultural factors. The solutions to those problems will necessarily come later, hopefully through work in the space that we have tried to open here.

The editing process has benefited from assistance from the Intercultural Studies Group at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, and particularly from the work of the doctoral candidates Alexander Perekrestenko, Isabel Chumbo, Nata Hajdu, Natividad Herrero Prado, Greta Holmer, Aysenaz Kos, Carlo Marzocchi, Luis Rodolfo Morán Quiroz, Sandra Poupaud, Blanca Rissech i Roig, Tatiana Salaet, Kayoko Takeda, Magdalena Talaban, Silvia Vilanova Subirats, Jennifer Varney and Maj Wagner-Nawrocka, to all of whom we express our sincere gratitude.