The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media

Esperança Bielsa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000478549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media provides the first comprehensive account of the role of translation in the media, which has become a thriving area of research in recent decades. It offers theoretical and methodological perspectives on translation and media in the digital age, as well as analyses of a wide diversity of media contexts and translation forms.

Divided into four parts with an editor introduction, the 33 chapters are written by leading international experts and provide a critical survey of each area with suggestions for further reading. The Handbook aims to showcase innovative approaches and developments, bridging the gap between currently separate disciplinary subfields and pointing to potential synergies and broad research topics and issues.

With a broad-ranging, critical and interdisciplinary perspective, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all students and researchers of translation studies, audiovisual translation, journalism studies, film studies and media studies.

The Open Access version of Chapter 1, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license.

Part IGeneral theoretical and methodological perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9781003221678-2

1Media and translationHistorical intersections

Anne O’Connor

DOI: 10.4324/9781003221678-3

Introduction

At a time of widespread technological change and upheaval, it is unsurprising that in recent years translation studies has turned its attention to the interaction and intersection between translation and media. As the media landscape has rapidly evolved, questions have emerged regarding the impact of media and translation on each other, and the significance of the non-human agent in the production, circulation and reception of translations. This chapter will examine how the intersections between media and translation have been theorized and will highlight medial interactions with forms and processes of translation. It will consider how the media of composition and the media of transmission might have a bearing on the eventual form and impact of the translation product, and will discuss the levels of agency attributed to media. I will employ the terms materiality and mediality to describe the form of communication used to create, contain and transmit a translation, and will use an inclusive understanding of media and media technology to encompass (but not limited to) vellum, paper, analogue, digital and human forms of communication.

Theoretical background

The theoretical coordinates for understanding how the medium impacts on the role and forms of translation go back to the 1950s and 1960s when challenges began to emerge to the notion that the medium of communication was a mere container, a tool for storage and transmission. Driven by scholars such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, there was a questioning in this period of how media environments shape our experience of the world. In arguing that ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan proposed that the media technology by which the content is stored and/or transmitted has the most significant consequences for society and culture, and that it truly deserves our attention (1962, 1967). He made the influential assertions that the importance of the media went beyond the content it carried, and that the technicity and mediality of the form shaped both the transmission and the reception of the content. This questioning of communication in relation to its worldly circumstances necessitated a consideration of the medium, its technical properties, and an exploration of the significance an object acquires from its form. Increasingly, communication technologies were not perceived as neutral conduits but instead as active processes and distinctive pervasive structures. From the 1980s, Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie argued for the importance of ‘non-authorial textual determinants’ and the necessity to consider the idea of a text as a complex structure of meanings embracing formal and physical presentation (McKenzie 2002). McKenzie ultimately made the foundational assertion that ‘forms effect meaning’, a prism of analysis which had a fundamental impact on media studies and which has become increasingly relevant and discussed in recent years (McKenzie 1999). McGann in his work drew attention to complex network of people, materials, and events involved in literary production, arguing that literature is a collaborative art and social process, with input from publishers, editors, designers and printers (1988). The significance of form, its agentive role in the creation of meaning has been underlined by subsequent scholars who have variously examined how the mind internalizes technologies (Ong 2013), and how technical tools such as word-processing impact on authorship (Kirschenbaum 2016). There has been a convergence around the notion that ‘any comprehension of a writing, no matter what kind it is, depends on the forms in which it reaches the reader’ (Chartier 1989: 161). Historians of the book, together with literary, cultural and media theorists have thus made the argument that material carriers impact on the communicative process, in both its creation and its reception (Cooren 2015; Gillespie, Boczkowski & Foot 2014; Kittler 1990, 1999; Pfeiffer & Gumbrecht 1994). It is a natural step then to ask what impact the materiality of the communication medium might have on translation, and to question how content, form, meaning and matter intersect in the translation realm.

Media and translation studies

Studies on the impact of the media of communication on translation have in recent years begun to gather traction. In this field, Karin Littau has led the rallying call for attention to the material forms of communication and translation, asserting that media ‘actively shape our perceptions and consequently also our mindsets, not through the content they carry, but through their material and technical properties’ (2016: 87, italics in the original). She has explored the applicability of this approach to translation studies, firstly in an article in 2011 and then in a discussion paper in 2016, both published in Translation Studies. In the 2011 article, Littau posed a number of questions relating to the impact of media on translation: what role has media technology played in the history of translation? What kind of impact have media transitions had not just on this or that translation, but on translation activity per se? What kinds of practices of translation can be associated with different media cultures and their particular hardwares? (2011: 262). In addressing these questions, Littau used examples from oral, scribal and digital realms to underscore her assertion that translation bears the traces of its particular technological environment (2011: 277). A link is thus made between, for example, the scribal culture of textual transcription of copying letter by letter, and the literalism present in word-for-word translation practices. Influenced by scholars such as Kittler, Littau questions how media determine our situations and argues (via Nietzsche) that writing tools work on our thoughts:

If we take seriously the entanglement of the material and the ideational, it is just as untenable to prioritize spirit over matter or subject over object as it is to downgrade media technologies to empty shells, the sole function of which it is to carry the fruits of the mind’s labours. Media are not merely instruments with which writers or translators produce meanings; rather, they set the framework within which something like meaning becomes possible at all.

(2016: 83, italics in the original)

Along with Littau, others in translation studies such as Mitchell, Cronin and Coldiron have explored the interrelationship between translation and materiality, and increasingly, translation scholars have come to appreciate that translations ‘acquire significance in connection to the material page and the medium in which they are encoded’ (Colombo 2019b: 151). Attention has been drawn to the material channels of translation and the role of technologies, forms, media and networks in shaping and informing multilingual cultural exchange and societal practices (Coldiron 2015, 2016; Cronin 2013; Mitchell 2010; O’Connor 2019). In his study on translation and globalization, Michael Cronin identified the need to pay attention to translation and things (rather than just translation and texts/people) and stated that it was impossible to conceive of translation outside of its object-world (2003: 10). Cronin raised questions about how technology shapes us, about the centrality of tools to translation and, like Littau in later publications, pushed for a view of medial carriers as constitutive. The necessity for attention to be paid to ‘carriers’ and ‘techniques’ was highlighted by D’hulst in his discussion of ‘assumed transfer’ where he argues that the clustering of transfer needs to address interrelations between the agents, carriers, source and target poles, products and techniques (D’hulst 2012). This recent research, with its focus on the material channels of translation, has thus highlighted the importance of paying attention to the platform on which the interaction takes place; the ethnographies of engagement specific to the medium (Hine 2015), and the role of technologies in shaping experiences, interactions and translation processes.

Nietzsche’s assertion regarding tools ‘working on’ thoughts has become a leitmotif for Littau but the degree of this ‘working on’ is a point of divergence. Does it mean that the tools influence, that they determine, that they impact, that they shape? What are the differences between these various interpretations and the degree of agency given to the media? Not many would argue with Littau that translations ‘bear the traces of their particular technological environment’ (2016: 90), or that the translator is ‘part of a material, medial and technologized ecology’ (2016: 85). However, just as Raymond Williams critiqued McLuhan’s ‘technological determinism’, arguing that his formalist approach to media was unable to encompass and explain the input of power, politics, institutions and society; there has also been a pushback against some elements of Littau’s argument on the impact of media, and in particular its determining effect on translation. The most contentious points relate to the proposition that media technologies organize cognitive and perceptual modalities and that material objects shape practices. In the various responses to Littau’s article published as forum papers in Translation Studies, some scholars have questioned the shaping of translation by media technology. Armstrong, for example, says that she is less sure that the history of technology

has shaped (i.e. acted upon) translation practices quite so explicitly as [Littau] suggests. It seems more likely to me that the technologies reflect textual practices, and these practices – and their visual disposition on the page – remain remarkable consistent through the centuries, although their physical support evolves through time.

(Armstrong 2016: 104)

Although there are many points of convergence, some divergences also emerge in the work of Cronin who in his response to Littau pointed to extraneous political factors that impinge on meaning (2017). Coldiron makes a similar point that cultural matrices need also be emphasized (2016), and Bachleitner, while acknowledging the importance of the medium, says that it is important not to forget the human agents and institutions involved in the production of translation, asserting that media ‘do not develop and work by themselves in a mystical way; they are invented, developed, adapted and eventually exchanged for other tools by human beings to serve certain purposes’ (2016: 108). These responses echo the arguments which pushed for more emphasis on social relations in response to McLuhan’s theories of media, and diverge like many media scholars on the degree of implication between humans and technology. The verbs that are used to describe the interaction between media and translation give an indication of the stance on the amount of agency perceived in technology: media are described variously as inflecting, shaping, catalysing, influencing or constructing meaning. For example Coldiron in her discussion on translation and print culture examined the capacity of media to intersect with and catalyse effects (Coldiron 2015: 17). Littau in her discussions favours the use of the verb to shape (2011, 2016).

At the heart of these debates on the extent and limitations of medial determinism is the perception of the human/object nexus. It is an issue that has been to the fore in material culture studies with debates on the ‘agentive’ nature of objects and their ability to impact on humans who created them. Thing theory for example, is founded on issues of how objects can be enactive partners in creating meaning (Brown 2010). It has been common practice in material culture to ‘read’ objects in the context of their changing situations, trying to elicit the cultural encoding that takes place in this object. However, since the late 1990s, there has been a move away from seeing language/objects as ‘encoding’ meaning to the view that language/objects are ‘agentive in the discursive co-construction of meaning’ (Burkette 2016: 318). New materialism, comprising composite sub-fields...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Translation and/in/of media
• Part I General theoretical and methodological perspectives
• Part II Translation and journalism
• Part III Multimedia translation
• Part IV Translation in alternative and social media
• Index