Corps de l’article

Rethinking translation processes seems to be a constant in Translation Studies today. Our discipline is moving towards new epistemological fields, beyond traditionally established boundaries. For some decades, Translation Studies has been focusing “on broader translinguistic aspects and transcultural processes” (Bassnett 2011: 72). Many publications show that ours is a field of research with “an impressive spectrum of topics approachable by means of a no less impressive set of tools or methods” (D’hulst and Gambier 2018: 1).

Many theorists have contributed to broadening the limits by incorporating new concepts and challenges: from Dirk Delabastita’s “Translation Studies for the 21st Century. Trends and Perspectives” (2003) to Yves Gambier’s “Rapid and Radical Changes in Translation and Translation Studies” (2016), Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer’s 2016 edited volume Border Crossings Translation Studies and Other Disciplines or Helle Dam, Matilde Nisbeth Brogger and Karen Korning Zethsen’s edited volume entitled Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies (2019), to mention just a few. One of the most recently published is Luc van Doorslaer and Ton Naaijkens’s The Situatedness of Translation Studies. Temporal and Geographical Dynamics of Theorization (2021), a volume which reassesses outdated definitions of Translation Studies through contributions describing non-Western conceptualisations of translation and translation theory in various cultural contexts, such as Chinese, Estonian, Greek, Russian and Ukrainian. What these and many other publications have in common is that they see Translation Studies as a discipline that must emerge and embrace other areas of knowledge and research methodologies.

Expanding the definition of translation means re-examining “conventional understandings of what constitutes translation and the position of the translator” (Cronin 2010: 1). This also implies, no doubt, that new ethical questions will be generated and that the translator’s response, seen now as an active agent throughout the whole process of translating, will have to be new.

It is within this context that Situatedness and Performativity. Translation and Interpreting Practice Revisited can be situated. In fact, the editors describe the field of Translation and Interpreting Studies as a varied and expansive one that encompasses different epistemologies and analytical frameworks. Their book is a very good example of this. The different chapters show the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary Translation Studies as well as its blurred limits and permeable boundaries. The different contributions go beyond text-centered thinking to examine how translation acts within the performing arts, as in the case of the artivist Guillermo Gómez Peña, thus including a multimodal perspective: how new views on translation imply trans-editing processes which reframe subjectivities in different cultural, temporal and situational environments, as in the case of the 2014 Hong Kong protests; or how situatedness and performativity appear when translating a Peruvian short story Alienación by Julio Ramón Ribeyro into American English. In all these case studies the contributors demonstrate how translation is today an important locus for raising questions connected to representation and to the linguistic construction of reality.

The second section of the book goes on to show how translation and interpreting are not reducible to their more traditional definitions. The contributors explore here the different subjectivities involved in translation and interpreting apart from translators and interpreters themselves. And with their case studies they analyse the role played by agents, editors, booksellers, producers, consumers and others in production and dissemination processes. Thus, one case study looks at the roles played by three contemporary translators in the selection and production of translated Afrikaans literature in the Low Countries, another case study surveys the role of publishers, agents and literary organisations in the selection and promotion of Dutch-language literature in Italy and yet another case study explores how translators acquire a status that sometimes overshadows that of the author, as in the case of Howard Goldblatt.

The last section of the volume investigates the role translators play in the temporal and spatial situatedness of translation, as in the case of the relationship between the translator Bernard Dhuicq and the writer Aphra Behn, the political potential of translation during the reign of three Qajar kings in Iran or the role of translation in educational contexts.

Through all its contributions, Situatedness and Performativity. Translation and Interpreting Practice Revisited shows that translating is a complex task. It is no longer a word-to-word process. As Coldiron argued some years ago,

Translation, in other words, is never reducible to its common definition, “putting a work into another language”; after the cultural turn in translation studies in the 1990s and the current “textual turn,” nearly all translation scholarship now acknowledges the many complications that proliferate around an act of translation. But the one consistently accessible site of transformative agency—what we can always hear working through these compounded complexities—is the translator’s voice.

Coldiron 2016: 311

This volume is a significant contribution to crossing borders in Translating and Interpreting Studies. It rewrites previous ideas on identity, politics, agents and other concepts that construct the situatedness and performativity of the processes of our discipline. Situatedness and Performativity. Translation and Interpreting Practice Revisited creates interconnections which lead us to embrace new theoretical and methodological challenges in order to bridge gaps, including those between cultural identity and performance persona, practice and theory. While reading the different contributions, I thought of Guillermo Gómez Peña’s words, written more than two decades ago and included in a book whose title, Dangerous Border Crossers, is significant here:

Like my performances, the (conscious) impulse behind my writings is the desire to speak as a public intellectual and a socially committed artist in a time and place where this appears to be a lost battle, and to attempt to do so in an innovative way, using every possible medium to which I have access: performance, installation art, film, radio, journalism, theory, the Internet, and when necessary, direct political action. In my work, all of these overlapping territories are interconnected through an intricate system of veins and wires. They feed one another, translate into one another, project shadows into all directions.

Gómez Peña 2000: viii

As this book demonstrates, translation practices include and encompass much more than word to word transfers. Situatedness and Performativity. Translation and Interpreting Practice Revisited suggests very different ways of understanding translation and the translator’s voice: “as assertive, interventionist, and with effective agency” (Coldiron 2016: 314). This volume is a clear example of what Coldiron highlighted years ago, that is:

[…] translations are always more than simple linguistic transfers, reflecting both particular interventions and broad trends […] ways to heed the translator’s voice in history and literature. Taken together, they suggest that restoring that voice and its agency to its rightful, prominent place therein can repair our incomplete canons, reconnect our nationally divided curricula, and enrich and enliven our studies of both past and present.”

Coldiron 2016: 322

Raquel Pacheco Aguilar and Marie-France Guénette’s edited volume shows, through many different although equally interesting case studies, that translation and interpreting are not just linguistic zones, but permanent sites for reinvention. Translation Studies is an open territory and the translator’s task should include making boundaries disappear in favour of enacted practices and performances with political and ethical dimensions.