Translation ‘going social’? Challenges to the (Ivory) Tower of Babel

Abstract

The discussion of “turns” or “paradigmatic shifts” which we can witness in the last few years in Translation Studies undoubtedly testifies to the discipline’s increasing establishment and recognition within the scientific community and of the increasing practice of a transdisciplinary research. These shifts also include what has been called the “sociological turn”, which comprises the cluster of questions dealing not only with the networks of agents and agencies and the interplay of their power relations, but also the social discursive practices which mould the translation process and which decisively affect the strategies of a text to be translated. This paper seeks to foreground some of the reasons which conditioned the upcoming of this “sociological turn” and will critically discuss if we can talk of a “turn” in its own right. A case study on the issue of interpreting in the World Social Forum will illustrate the necessity to broaden both traditional concepts, and, consequently, the domains of teaching and research once we take a shift towards a social perspective on the translatorial activity seriously.