Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Identity and
Status in the Translational Professions. Benjamins Current Topics 32.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. XIII + 282 pp. ISBN 978 90 272 0251 2.
€95.00. $143.
Reviewed by Gisella M. Vorderobermeier (University of Graz)
This volume sets out to “contribute to the emerging research on the social forma-
hkpolyuhkg/1 IP: 158.132.124.180 On: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 03:02:26
While most of the articles have a very clear-cut focus on one of the transla-
tional professions, three contributions — namely those of Andy Chan (discussed
above), David Katan and the piece co-authored by Robin Setton and Alice Guo
Liangliang — span either the whole professional arena of translation and inter-
preting or at least a major part of it, albeit for different reasons.
David Katan’s contribution, “Occupation or Profession: A Survey of the
Translators’ World” (65–87) is characterized by a certain nonchalance in arrang-
ing his data, which is not, however, detrimental to the article as a whole. The same
holds true for some of its methodological flaws. His aim is nothing less than gain-
ing an insight into translators’ and interpreters’ mind-sets or “perception of their
working world” (66), perhaps even to find “a supranational practitioner identity”
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In this first section, the juxtaposition of several empirical studies with di-
verse methodological designs (among them several survey-based studies) in itself
renders the volume particularly valuable in terms of its potential for stimulating
further research and inviting methodological reflection. A meta-methodological
“survey of surveys” (49) like that of Franz Pöchhacker (“Conference Interpreting:
Surveying the Profession,” 49–63), included in the first section, is also well placed
in a book such as this. Although it is compiled according to an explicitly person-
ally informed perspective and as such does not lay claim to exhaustiveness, this
piece offers a much-needed overview of what has been achieved in survey-based
research in the area of conference interpreting. Here, the perception of practitio-
ners’ roles emerges as one of the major concerns within the corpus.
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The section on “Questions of Role and Identity” starts with an article by Reine
Meylaerts, which is a thorough and carefully composed piece on the socio-biogra-
phies of native literary author-translators in a diglossic society (Belgium) marked
by linguistic conflicts. On this basis she derives a tentative typology of the habitus
of the individuals in question, which is moulded not least by these conflicts and
the ensuing hierarchies between (their working) languages.
The article is followed by Hannah Amit-Kochavi’s contribution. Drawing on
more than three decades of data-collection, the author presents a picture of the en-
tire population (consisting of 170 individuals) of literary translators from Arabic
into Hebrew from the late 19th century until today. Set against the background of
changing historical and political contexts in British-ruled Palestine and later in
Israel, the author concentrates on ethnic affiliation, education, occupations and
ideological attitudes as well as on analysing recurrent work patterns. As the blurb
puts it, this volume aims to study “ ‘the group of individuals’ who perform the
complex translation and/or interpreting task, thereby creating their own space of
cultural production” (blurb); Amit-Kochavi’s contribution matches this aim to
perfection. The wealth of empirical material renders it a fascinating and unique
piece of research.
The highly interesting and convincing article by Elena Baibikov, aptly titled
“Revised Translations, Revised Identities: (Auto)biographical Contextualization
of Translation” and taking as its central example one of the eminent figures in
literary translation in Japan, Yuasa Yoshiko, deals with the mutual influence of
life experiences and processes of the construction of (professional) identity (as
expressed in a given translational approach). Regrettably, though, some notions,
such as “gender identity” (174) or the “cognitive as well as emotional map of the
world” (ibid.), remain under-conceptualized.
Kumiko Torikai’s article recapitulates some of the central findings of her
monograph Voices of the Invisible Presence: Diplomatic Interpreters in Post-
World War II Japan. Using oral history as a method, she arrives at finely nuanced
326 Book reviews
These practices, as becomes evident from the article, are very meaningful for the
professional group and have been shaping professionalization in this area from its
very beginnings in the late 1980s.
Şebnem Bahadır’s thought-provoking article touches upon “critical discourse
on translators’ ethics and ideology and the activist demand on interfering with and
reformulating translators’ social role” (5) and as such is a suitable conclusion to
the volume. The article’s section headings indicate its thematic range: “The task”;
“The third person”; “The paradox”; “The voice.” With its bare eleven pages, the
paper struggles somewhat to accommodate the ideas of thinkers like Simmel and
Derrida (and Zygmunt Bauman, en passant); more room would have been needed
for an elaboration of how their thinking can be related to translational matters.
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The author refers to Simmel and his notion of “der Unparteiische” to describe the
position of the interpreter as “the third” who by his/her very presence introduces a
qualitative change in the constellation (dyad to triad), while she invokes Derrida’s
notion of “to profess” in her thoughts on the necessity of a performative turn in
interpreting research and teaching.
To sum up, the contributions in this carefully edited and eminently readable
volume (with an excellent and useful index) present a wealth of empirical material
as well as a great deal of stimulating conceptual work. The volume is indispensable
reading for Translation Studies scholars interested in the sociology of professions
and it offers a number of insights with respect to the sociology of translation in
general. It is, moreover, highly recommended to anyone trying to keep up with
the not-so-mechanic mechanisms and driving forces underlying differentiation
processes within our field of study and the “effets de théorie” (Bourdieu 1981) in-
forming them.
References
Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1981. “Décrire et prescrire.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 38: 69-73.
DOI: 10.3406/arss.1981.2120
Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London: Routledge.
Dam, Helle, and Karen Korning Zethsen, eds. 2009. Translation Studies: Focus on the Translator.
Special Issue of Hermes 42.
Morris, Ruth. 1999. “The Face of Justice: Historical Aspects of Court Interpreting.” Interpreting
4 (1): 97-123. DOI: 10.1075/intp.4.1.10mor
Schultheis, Franz. 2009. “Rethinking the Capability Approach for the Younger Generation:
‘Youth’ as a Factory to Produce a Flexible and Employable Workforce.” In From Employability
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328 Book reviews
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet, and Miriam Shlesinger. 2008. “Strategies of Image-Making and Status
Advancement of Translators and Interpreters as a Marginal Occupational Group: A
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79-90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/btl.75.07sel
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet. 2010. “‘Stars’ or ‘Professionals’: The Imagined Vocation and Exclusive
Knowledge of Translators in Israel.” MonTI 2: 131-152. DOI: 10.6035/MonTI.2010.2.7
Torikai, Kumiko. 2009. Voices of the Invisible Presence: Diplomatic Interpreters in Post-World War
II Japan. Benjamins Translation Library 83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/
btl.83
Wadensjö, Cecilia, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, and Anna-Lena Nilsson, eds. 2007. The Critical
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Reviewer’s address
Gisella M. Vorderobermeier
Institut für Translationswissenschaft
Universität Graz
Merangasse 70
8010 Graz
Austria
gisella.vorderobermeier@uni-graz.at