Maricel Botha - Power and Ideology in South African Translation: A Social Systems Perspective

Book cover of Power and Ideology in South African Translation

Translation History

Palgrave Macmillan is very excited to announce a new series: Palgrave Macmillan is very excited to announce a new series: Translation History. This new series is the first to take a global and interdisciplinary view of translation and translators across time, place, and cultures. It also offers an untapped opportunity for interactions between translation and interpreting studies, comparative literature, art history, and print and book history.. This new series is the first to take a global and interdisciplinary view of translation and translators across time, place, and cultures. It also offers an untapped opportunity for interactions between translation and interpreting studies, comparative literature, art history, and print and book history.

Translation History aims to become an essential forum for scholars, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in or work on the history and practice of translation and its cultural agents (translators, interpreters, publishers, editors, artists, cultural institutions, governments). aims to become an essential forum for scholars, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in or work on the history and practice of translation and its cultural agents (translators, interpreters, publishers, editors, artists, cultural institutions, governments).

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15957 All proposals and final manuscripts are peer-reviewed by experts in the field, either on the editorial board or beyond.

The series publishes book-length studies (80,000 words), as well as shorter publications (25,000 to 50,000 words) which will appear as Palgrave Pivot publications.

Translation History

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

M. Botha Power and Ideology in South African Translation Translation History https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61063-0_1

Translation sociology Power Ideology History Social systems theory

Of all the types of communication that constantly frame and re-frame conceptions of the world and shape or reflect societal power dynamics, interlingual translation is one whose contribution seems comparatively insignificant. Political discourse, mass media and literature , for example, though subject to certain constraints, appear to possess a rather vociferous potential for communicative assertion and leave obvious opportunities for the construction and propagation of world views and the reflection of various ideologies. By contrast, the unassuming act of translation, shrouded in a guise of functionalism and constrained by a comparatively stringent requirement to conform, seems to allow little room for a socially reflective or socially influential function. Yet this assumption is far from accurate and social analyses of translation have uncovered very direct and influential relations between translation and matters such as power and ideology. Maria Tymoczko (: 12) explains translations socially reflective potential as follows:

The translation record between languages and cultures is a particularly rich source of information about cultural transfer both synchronically and diachronically, illuminating, for example, the shape of the literary systems involved, reception conditions, patronage effects, power relations between cultures, and so forth. Moreover, when translation occurs within a complex, multilingual cultural system [] translations reveal much of interest about cultural stratification , competing values within a culture , literary prestige , and the like.