“DID ANYONE SAY POWER?”:
RETHINKING DOMINATION
AND HEGEMONY IN TRANSLATION
INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION STUDIES
CONFERENCE AT BANGOR UNIVERSITY
WALES, UK, 5-6 SEPTEMBER 2013
KEYNOTE SPEECHES
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KEYNOTE I
José Lambert (University of Leuven, CETRA, Belgium)
Main Arts Lecture Theatre, Thursday 10:00 – 11:00, Chair: tbc
UNIVERSITIES, LANGUAGES AND TRANSLATIONS: ANOTHER CHAPTER ON POWER
No need to list the number of books devoted to the relations between language and power, and though scholars
have often felt seduced by the idea to reply with power arguments, they have often preferred to rely on verbal
arguments. Fortunately, since 1) research itself is also a power argument, and since 2) it would be
counterproductive to substitute action to research. Would it mean that our symposium is coming late? Even the
idea that translation often fulfils a crucial role in power games is not very new since contemporary Translation
Studies (TS) pays a heavy tribute to sociology, just on the basis of concepts such as norms, conflicts, priorities,
etc. Besides scholarly evidences, the history of mankind has provided us also with convincing illustrations of
verbal power games that were supposed to support the language of many armies. And the Internet shows us every
day how rich human imagination is from this perspective. The fact is that the translation issue remains heavily
unexplored from the moment we want to establish where, when, how, etc. the power components infiltrate the
translation worlds from past and present. And we don’t see how to exclude the future. Let us say that the so-called
descriptive component in TS remains fully necessary, which makes still more evident that the explanatory
approaches are necessarily coming at later stages. Fine news for young scholars, after all.
The fact that, so far, the language of universities has been used so rarely in view of a scholarly analysis (selfanalysis) is almost funny. It is and has been the ambition of Universe-City to recognize the universal world as an
object of study, and one does not see how communication and discourse would be excluded, the more from the
moment communication is accepted as the core business (quite a few governments and academics tend to believe
that business and industrial production have priority over discourse). In our age of global communication and in
our age of the lingua franca boom, the academic world does not dig much deeper than polemical debates in favour
of, or against English. In previous centuries, the so-called universal assets of Latin and French have not stimulated
more fundamental reflections on the global communication of scholarship.
It is hard not to recognize that the power issue is unavoidable from the beginning, in case we wonder about the
strange status of academic communities as such, from the Middle Ages until now. Medieval communities were
not (yet) submitted to any language regulations. According to Anderson (1982) and Hobsbawm (1996), such
regulations have been worked out at a later stage, during the (slow) birth of the Nation-State, with the heavy
support of academia (professors) and writers. The priorities given to the development of the national language (the
officially bilingual nations have mainly supported one of the official languages, and rather forgotten about the
other ones) reflects obvious hesitations in relation with the universal claims (Universe-City), notwithstanding the
use of Latin, later French, then English) – at least in the (West-)European and the North-American framework.
The power argument can hardly be disconnected from any of the basic options (the local one as well as the
international one). Not only because they have been taken as self-evident, not on the basis of any consultation or
research. Questions and polemics around academic management have been invented at an earlier stage than “May
68” – but they were certainly not concentrating on language issues.
Until the beginning of the 21st century, even translation scholars have not yet discovered that academic
bilingualism (and multilingualism, which sociolinguists accept as unavoidable) is only the result of a particular
language policy. Not unlike nations, universities adopt a given language policy, without too many explanations.
But the everyday life (the 24 hours per day) of the immigrant student or the staff members never takes shape in
the (more or less 7000: de Swaan 2001) languages of the “universe”? The interaction with the entire world (?)
takes place in several working languages (as in the European Union), and the imported as well as the exported
discourse undergoes integration processes according to many unwritten principles. Whether “translating” or not
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(what’s in a name?), bilingual or multilingual “speakers” are systematically dealing with “foreign” discourse, in
terms of terminology, quotations, paragraphs, text fragments or entire texts. They have strong reasons for avoiding
the translation concept? Not only financial ones, but also in terms of competency. It is one of the paradoxes of
academia that the budgets for translation are amazingly low. Because academics know the (more or less 7000)
languages of the world? Rather “because there is no language policy without a translation policy” (Meylaerts
2011). Such paradoxes become embarrassing in the Age of Globalization, due to the necessity to make the
international ambitions of any university more explicit – and due to the institutionalization of the new
communication worlds (from email to the Internet and other new media).
Not only the full world of communication is open. But also a very long list of research questions about University
as such, this strange “community of practice” that seems to assume that international communication, language
and translation are largely unproblematic.
References
Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities, London & New York: Verso.
De Swaan, Abram (2001) Words of the World. The Global Language System, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1996) ‘Language, Culture and National Identity’, Social Research 63(4): 1065-1080.
Meylaerts, Reine (2011) ‘Translational Justice in a Multilingual World: An Overview of Translational Regimes’,
Meta: Journal des Traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal, 56(4): 743–757.
Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
José Lambert worked at K.U. Leuven as a Professor in (Comparative) Literary Studies and in Translation Studies
until his retirement in 2006. He is still actively involved in research coordination, mainly in Translation Studies
where his main goal remains opening up translation research to interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches and
where he assumes that the main achievement is the progressive and worldwide recognition of the field on the level
of PhD curricula. As a Flemish student from the after-War situation in the 1950’s and 60’s, Lambert specialized
first in Romance Philology followed by Comparative Literature, where he researched cultural interaction, first in
its impact on literary dynamics, in particular in two centuries of French-German relations (Ludwig Tieck dans les
lettres françaises. Aspects d'une résistance au romantisme allemand, 1976), and then while widening this cultural
area into methodological discussions. From 1970 on and mainly since 1976 (Literature and Translation, 1976 and
1978), the question of translation became a key issue, first as a central question within literary studies, then as a
key problem in cultural dynamics. During these different steps into interculturality and interdisciplinarity,
Lambert tried to combine theoretical innovation with historical awareness while integrating e.g. the pioneering
work by Gideon Toury and Itamar Even-Zohar. Since the 1990’s he is also concerned with sociological models as
well as concepts from psychology, organization theory, etc. Lambert’s name is linked with initiatives from 25
years ago which continue influencing research on translation. In 1989, together with Gideon Toury, he created the
international Translation Studies journal Target. In the same year, he created the CETRA special research program
in Translation Studies at the University of Leuven, which since then successfully promotes research training in the
study of translational phenomena and stimulates high-level research into the cultural functions of translation. He
also remains involved in other recurrent publications such as the Translation Studies Bibliography. Since 2011 he
is a Visiting Professor at the Translation Studies Institute at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil.
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KEYNOTE II
Karen Bennett (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, ULICES, Portugal)
Main Arts Lecture Theatre, Thursday, 17:30 – 18:30, Chair: tbc
RESISTANT TRANSLATION IN THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE:
CAN IT COMBAT EPISTEMICIDE?
Since its inception in the 17th century, modern science has been something of a handmaiden to
capitalism, called upon to serve in the relentless pursuit of power and wealth. Today, with the ringfencing of funding for “STEM” courses and the concomitant demise of traditional humanistic forms
of learning, the scientific paradigm has become so hegemonic in the Anglo-Saxon world that its
discourse, research methods and underlying theory of knowledge have invaded other disciplines and
cultures in a process that the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1996, 2001) has termed
“epistemicide”.
This paper explores whether resistant translation, as advocated by theorists such as Venuti (1995),
Tymoczko (2007, 2010) and Baker (2006), has a role to play in combating this apparently
inexorable drift towards an epistemological monoculture. It looks first at the situation of academic
translators operating in the professional marketplace, who often have to practise epistemicide on a
daily basis in order to ensure that their clients’ papers are publishable in the prestigious
international journals to which all aspire (Bennett 2007, 2013). To what extent are these translators
free to practise foreignizing techniques in a Global Knowledge Exchange where epistemes are
valued primarily for their capacity to produce real-life applications and generate wealth? And what
are the costs of doing so, not only for the translator herself, but also for the text’s author, whose
career advancement and access to funding may depend heavily upon a track record of international
publications?
It then moves on to examine the (unusual) case of a foreign celebrity author (Michel Foucault),
whose works were translated into English using foreignizing techniques, and discusses the impact
that this strategy has had upon the reception of his work in the English-speaking world. It suggests
that Sheridan Smith’s translations of Les mots et les choses [“The Order of Things”, 1970],
L’archéologie du savoir [“The Archaeology of Knowledge”, 1972] and Surveiller et punir
[“Discipline and Punish”, 1977], by sticking very closely to the patterns of the original French,
were very difficult for the English mind to process, and consequently sealed Foucault’s reputation
in Anglo-Saxon culture as more opaque and inaccessible than he was considered to be in France.
The paper concludes by tentatively broaching a strategy that might be used to negotiate a middle
course between these two extremes, and which involves training translators for a much more
proactive role in the process of cultural mediation.
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References
Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London and New York:
Routledge.
Bennett, Karen (2007) ‘Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse’, in Sonia Cunico and
Jeremy Munday (eds), Translation and Ideology: Encounters and Clashes, special edition of
The Translator 13(2): 151–169.
------ (2013) ‘English as a Lingua Franca in Academia: Combating Epistemicide through Translator
Training’, in Stefania Taviano (ed), English as a Lingua Franca: Implications for Translator
and Interpreter Education, special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 7(2):169–
193.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (1996) ‘The fall of the Angelus Novus: Beyond the Modern Game of
Roots and Options’, Working paper series on Political Economy of Legal Change, 3.
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
----- (2001) ‘Towards an Epistemology of Blindness: Why the New Forms of ‘Ceremonial
Adequacy’ neither Regulate nor Emancipate’, European Journal of Social Theory 4(3): 251–
279.
Tymoczko, Maria (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, Manchester: St Jerome.
------ (ed) (2010) Translation, Resistance, Activism, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Venuti, Lawrence (2008/1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London and
New York: Routledge.
Karen Bennett has worked as a professional translator for over 20 years, specializing in the
translation of academic texts from Portuguese, French and (occasionally) Spanish into English, and
her research into the power dynamics at play in the transfer of knowledge has drawn heavily upon
this practical experience. In the 7 or 8 years that she has been engaged in Translation Studies
research, she has published over 30 articles and 2 books (with another monograph and two edited
volumes forthcoming) and has been invited to give plenary lectures and guest seminars in various
countries. Her work on the notion of ‘epistemicide’ in academic discourse has drawn wide
international acclaim, see especially her ground-breaking articles ‘Galileo’s Revenge: Ways of
Construing Knowledge and Translation Strategies in the Era of Globalisation’ (Social Semiotics,
2007), ‘Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse’ and ‘The Scientific Revolution and its
Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse’ (both in The Translator, 2007 and 2011).
She is currently a researcher with the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, and teaches
academic/scientific writing and translation at the University of Coimbra.
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KEYNOTE III
Luc van Doorslaer (University of Leuven, CETRA, Belgium):
Main Arts Lecture Theatre, Friday, 9:00 – 10:00
TRANSLATION POLICY AND NATIONALISM.
TURNING MINORITIES AND MAJORITIES UPSIDE DOWN
When Belgium appears in foreign media, the perspective very often is that of a country with
linguistic quarrels. Election results are interpreted through the (sole) frame of nationalist and
language-related antagonisms, sometimes more than in Belgium itself: the Dutch-speaking Flanders
against the French-speaking Wallonia. This lecture will start with a brief historical overview of the
legal situation and show how language policy and linguistic power relationships have developed in
the 20th century. It will also concentrate on the crucial position of translation in (every?) language
policy.
Only few foreigners know that Belgium actually has three official languages. In the eastern part of
the country exists a small German-speaking community. On the basis of the history and the
paradoxical position of German (the major language in the European Union, the minor language in
Belgium), this presentation will use the situation of German in Belgium to focus on linguistic power
relationships (both in Europe and in Belgium). In particular it will relate these power relationships
to translation policy. Despite the clear legal position of translation into German in Belgium, official
translation policy and translation practice often look very different. This situation seems to be
inextricably linked to the institutional situation of Belgium and based upon a strict bipolar thinking
in national categories about translation.
Recently Michaela Wolf published a book on the language and translation policy in the Habsburg
monarchy (Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens, 2012). Her sociological and partly postcolonial
framework for approaching translation policy yields interesting concepts that may put the basic
principles of Belgian translation policy into question or at least problematise them from a
translation studies researcher’s point of view.
Luc van Doorslaer is an Associate Professor in Translation and Journalism Studies as well as Vice
Dean for Research at the University of Leuven – Campus Antwerp (Belgium). As a Research
Fellow he is affiliated with Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He is a staff member of
CETRA, the Centre for Translation Studies (KU Leuven). Together with Yves Gambier, he is the
editor of the online Translation Studies Bibliography (9th release 2012) and the volumes of the
new Handbook of Translation Studies (2010-ongoing). His main research interests are: ideology
and translation, journalism and translation, imagology and translation, Translation Studies
resources. He also works as a journalist for Dutch-language Belgian television.
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KEYNOTE IV
Christina Schäffner (Aston University, Birmingham, UK):
Main Arts Lecture Theatre, Friday, 12:00 – 13:00
POWER HIDDEN IN TRANSLATION
Translation is a social practice, performed by agents in socio-cultural and socio-political settings. In
modern Translation Studies, attention has been given to investigating these settings and the role of
agents involved. Such research has brought questions of power to the fore, and hidden agendas of
power behind translating and behind translations have increasingly been addressed. Translations as
products may have undergone several processing stages in which different agents were involved.
Any analysis based solely on the product will normally mean that the various procedures and agents
remain invisible. In news translation, for example, it is hardly feasible to reconstruct the exact text
production and translation processes. There may, however, be subtle traces in a text which can
signal decision-making and power relations which were underlying these decisions. This
presentation will illustrate examples of such potentially hidden power with reference to news
translation and interpreted press conferences. It will ask whose power and whose hidden agenda
may be revealed (if at all). It will also reflect on the question whether phenomena thus identified
can indeed best be explained with reference to the concept of power.
Christina Schäffner is Professor of Translation Studies at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. Her
main research interests are political discourse analysis and translation, metaphor research, and
translation didactics. She has published widely on these topics. She is also a member of the editorial
board and/or advisory board of several journals, including Target, Translation Studies, Discourse
and Society. She teaches courses in translation studies, interpreting, text analysis and supervises
PhD students in these areas. For several years, she has been a member of the international CETRA
staff (annual summer school for PhD students in translation studies), and was CETRA chair
professor in 2011. She is responsible for one of the four sub-projects of the Marie Curie initial
training network TIME (Translation Research Training: An Integrated and Intersectoral Model for
Europe) established with support from the European Commission. She is a member of the steering
committee of OPTIMALE, an Erasmus academic network Optimising Professional Translator
Training in a Multilingual Europe. From 2007-2009, she was a member of the EMT expert group
set up by the Directorate General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission whose main
task was to make specific proposals with a view to implementing a European Master's in
Translation (EMT) throughout the European Union.
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