The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization

Esperança Bielsa, Dionysios Kapsaskis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000283822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is the first handbook to provide a comprehensive coverage of the main approaches that theorize translation and globalization, offering a wide-ranging selection of chapters dealing with substantive areas of research. The handbook investigates the many ways in which translation both enables globalization and is inevitably transformed by it.

Taking a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, the authors are leading researchers drawn from the social sciences, as well as from translation studies. The chapters cover major areas of current interdisciplinary interest, including climate change, migration, borders, democracy and human rights, as well as key topics in the discipline of translation studies. This handbook also highlights the increasing significance of translation in the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time, while accounting for the new technologies and practices that are currently deployed to cope with growing translation demands.

With five sections covering key concepts, people, culture, economics and politics, and a substantial introduction and conclusion, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation and globalization within translation and interpreting studies, comparative literature, sociology, global studies, cultural studies and related areas.

Part I
Key concepts

1
Translation encounters and the histories of globalization

David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe

Introduction

Understanding the nature of translation practices in relation to globalization processes necessarily involves careful historical consideration of both. This is a challenging endeavour, because there is no generally shared understanding either of what ‘globalization’ entails, or of its history. But no matter how one defines globalization, with however many phenomena and whatever types of processes it is assumed to involve, and however long one thinks its history is, it is certainly the case that translation must be regarded as central to globalization dynamics (Cronin 2003; Bielsa 2014, 2016).

The term ‘globalization’ in one way or another refers to processes of connectivity, whereby some people in some places are brought into new forms of connection with other people in other places. In any specific case, there is a good chance that each group will not speak or read the same language as the other. Hence processes of translation are crucial for globalization, because they allow connections to happen in the first place, and then can profoundly shape how those connections develop over time (Chanda 2007).

In this chapter we will not adopt any one viewpoint on what globalization is or when it began, but we will instead keep an open mind about such matters. This is so that the broadest possible analysis can be offered of globalization/translation interfaces, as these have occurred over the centuries in different places, and in so doing have brought different places and people into new forms of connectivity and interaction.

We will first set out the various possible answers to the interconnected questions what is globalization and when did it begin? Then we will consider how translation activities are bound up with globalization processes, first in terms of the actions of the human actors who do the translations, and then the locations where translations are carried out. Finally, we will illustrate the general points raised in these earlier sections with some illustrative examples drawn from Eurasia from ancient times until the start of the modern era. In this way we will attempt to map out the connections between historical modes of globalization and forms of translation practices, in ways that to our knowledge no-one has yet attempted.

Defining globalization and its history

Among scholars today, there is no consensus as to what ‘globalization’ entails, or what its history involves. The definitional and historiographical aspects are deeply intertwined: how one defines globalization entails specific understandings of its history, and vice versa. Narrating the history of ‘globalization’ involves making a series of assumptions – about what the term refers to, which processes it encompasses (and which it does not), how the various processes can be understood to connect with each other, and, crucially, when globalization is meant to have ‘begun’. Opinions on the latter issue vary greatly, from positions which see globalization as a very recent set of phenomena – perhaps dating from about the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall – to viewpoints which regard globalization as involving very long-term processes that have operated over thousands of years (Inglis 2005).

There is a large and complex literature in which various specialists – such as historians, and historically oriented economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others – debate the vexed issue of when globalization ‘began’. There are various possible responses, varying in chronological extent. First, globalization is at least several thousand years old, perhaps stretching back as much as 5,000 years. Second, globalization can be found in the ancient world, in the two millennia before and after the time of Christ. Third, globalization could have started in the period after the fall of the Roman Empire, or in the early medieval world. Fourth, globalization begins around about 1500 CE, around the time of the European conquest of the Americas, and the start of modern capitalism in Europe. Fifth, globalization starts in either the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries CE, with the coming to dominance of the European empires across the planet, and then the industrial revolution in Europe. Sixth, some scholars assert that globalization only really takes off in the twentieth century, either in the aftermath or WWII, or with the development of new features of the capitalist economy in the 1970s, or with the end of Soviet Communism in the late 1980s, or with the rise of internet and related communications technologies in the 1990s (for overviews, see Bentley 1999, 2006; Hopkins 2002; Gills and Thompson 2006; McKeown 2007; Pieterse 2012).

As can be seen from this list, practically any period of human history can be chosen as the starting point of globalization. The choice is wholly dependent on how any given analyst defines globalization, and which phenomena they choose to focus on as evidence of globalization’s apparent beginnings. Once a starting point has been chosen, a model can be created of what that analyst believes were the periods that variously (a) were wholly ‘before’ globalization; (b) created the conditions for, and acted as the run-up to, globalization (such periods are often referred to as those of ‘proto-globalization’); (c) involved the beginning of ‘globalization’ per se; (d) constitute the subsequent phases of globalization, from the beginning period up until our own time (Bayly 2002). Howsoever more ‘modern’ phases of globalization may be conceived, it is important not to assume that these are either completely different from pre-modern variants, or, conversely, are just bigger and more expansive versions of previous phases. Each phase may build on previous ones, or may involve ruptures with them (Bentley 1999).

The scope for dispute and confusion in labelling the different alleged periods of globalization is potentially endless. Periods that some scholars refer to as ‘archaic’ globalization (Bayly 2002), others refer to as not involving globalization at all, or conversely as ‘proto-globalization’. There is some consensus among scholars that the period around 1500 CE is somehow special. This partly reflects an apparently commonsensical assumption: surely globalization only really begins when most of the planet is involved in its processes? If so, then given that the Americas were only pulled into systematic connection with Eurasia and Africa after that point, with Australasia following a little later, it must be the case that globalization ‘proper’ only really begins at the start of the 1500s CE. The European conquest of the Americas must therefore be understood as the great turning-point in the emergence of planet-wide connectivity.

This idea sounds plausible on the surface. But if there is anything that the debate about the beginnings of globalization can teach us is that common-sense assumptions do not pass muster when put under historical scrutiny. Focussing on the period about 1500 CE is deeply Eurocentric. It assumes that globalization, and more broadly world history, pivot on relatively recent European interventions. It also assumes a diffusionist model, where action emanates from a Western centre, spreading outwards to non-Western peripheries, instead of recognizing that the circulation of people, ideas, languages and objects over time has been much more complex and multicentric than that (Olohan 2014).

Such a chauvinist and parochial viewpoint omits many other things too: that much of the forms of human connectivity throughout planetary history were created in other parts of the globe beyond Europe; that the Europeans were late starters in this regard; that much of Europe’s alleged distinctiveness and innovative nature were borrowed, usually in unacknowledged ways, from other civilizations, notably China; and that over-emphasis on the role of the so-called ‘West’ goes together with the equally untenable assumption that globalization must be wholly ‘modern’ in nature. Given that there were extensive trade networks across Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa many centuries before 1500 CE, one could argue that globalization was well in place before then (Frank and Gills 1993). So, what if globalization is as much to be found in, say, thirteenth-century CE Mongolia as it is in nineteenth-century CE London? What if evidence points us towards finding the presence of globalization at times, and in places, including ‘pre-modern’ ones, that Eurocentric and modernist thinking has trained us not to look at?

Both contemporary globalization studies and translation history have become over the last 20 years more attuned to understanding history in non-Eurocentric ways, which emphasize instead trans-regional flows and circulations, and polycentric complexity (Bandia 2006). Such a shift in emphasis has great implications for how translation in history is understood and studied. Up until quite recently, translation studies and translation history could be accused of deep Eurocentrism. This took various forms. One was uncritically using Judeo-Christian timeframes (ancient, medieval, modern, etc.) as if these were somehow natural and applicable the world over. Another was assuming that the civilizations like ancient Judea, Greece and Rome, from which came the great, canonized texts like the Bible – which scholars primarily focussed on, while ignoring more mundane writings – were simply coherent and self-contained cultural totalities (Bandia 2006).

But once one looks at the world through the lens of globalization theory, which itself has been sensitized by post-colonial thinking to recognize historical complexity and difference, things look very different. As Appiah (1995: 55) writes:

The Greece to which the West looks back was at the crossroads of cultures of North Africa and the Near East; the Spain that began the conquest of the New World had been deeply shaped by Islam; the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient learning owed a great deal to the Arabs who had preserved that tradition through the European Dark Ages; and the economic basis of modern capitalism depended on the labour of Africans, the gold and silver of the New World Indians, and the markets of Asia … The West acquired gunpowder – at the military heart of the modern European state – from China and the astronomical data on which was based the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution from the ancient Near East.

So what may seem like self-enclosed cultural and civilizational entities are in fact hybrids, and indeed one way to describe the history of globalization is to say that it is the history of different socio-cultural entities coming into contact, and new entities being created in the process. Such hybridization is made possible in and through translation practices, both those that are more explicit and, perhaps more often, hidden and subterranean.

‘Translation’ here means two things: first, something more general – ideas and cultural influences from some groups are adopted, adapted and transformed by others; and second, something more precise – the adoption, adaptation and transformation had to operate somehow through linguistic means. Translation practices have been the means through which different groups, cultures and civilizations have influenced each other, and have thereby created new, hybrid entities, the mixed nature of which has often been subsequently denied. But the complex mixing that has happened becomes apparent again when we look at such matters in light of globalization processes, and this becomes even more clear when we understand these globalization processes as themselves involving complicated practices of translation.

Connections and actors

The connections involved in, and made through, globalization processes can be of a potentially infinite variety. But certain types have reoccurred again and again over time across the world. They include forms of peaceful and constructive interchange, as well as violent forms of control and domination. They can involve face-to-face contacts between specific persons, or more indirect, impersonal, and mediated connections. They can be of a more economic nature (e.g. trading connections), or of a more political type (e.g. imperial conquests, and resistance to those by the colonized), or of a more cultural sort (e.g. religious conversions). It is likely that some or all of these types will be intermingled in any given real-world case (Holton 2005).

Each type of connection, and how they may mix with each other, is made possible by, and depends on, associated translation processes. For example, different groups can only keep trading with each other, and so bring their parts of the world into economic connection, if they work out some sort of way of communicating, involving translating between two or more languages. The history of economic globalization (or as some scholars would prefer to say, the economic facets of globalization) is full of instances of ‘pidgin’ languages being created to allow trading relations to operate. Likewise, what we can call political globalization (how different political units, such as nation-states or empires, relate to each other) is dependent on translation practices. An invading army needs interpreters to speak with the local population, to gain crucial information and co-opt local knowledges. A conquering power will need to find ways to communicate with the conquered, and to impose its own language upon them in some ways, such as by demanding that official business be conducted only in the conquerors’ language, and by rendering place and street names into the dominant language. Yet conquerors may also live in fear of the potential duplicity of native translators, who might feed the masters faulty information (Cronin 2000).

Religious globalization (which primarily involves the spread of belief systems across territories) partly relies on missionaries being able to talk with potential converts in ways that the latter understand (Chanda 2007). Conversion often means the converted adopting the language of the missionaries and therefore of the holy texts that they venerate. The same sort of point applies to other types or facets of globalization. Cultural globalization (the spread of ideas and imageries across space) and social globalization (the creation of new sorts of social relationships across distances, including between people who were previously disconnected, in whole or in part) also rely on translation practices (Inglis with Thorpe 2019).

Focussing on tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: the intersection between translation and globalization
• Part I Key concepts
• Part II People
• Part III Culture
• Part IV Economics
• Part V Politics
• Conclusion: paradoxes at the intersection of translation and globalization
• Index