[Linganth] CFP AAA2018: Power in Translation

[Melissa Krug]

Dear all,

We are looking for panelists for the 2018 AAA Meetings for a session on
translation practices and power asymmetries. Our working abstract is below.
Please submit abstracts (250 words) to Nicole Nathan (
nicole.nathan at temple.edu) and me (melissa.krug at temple.edu) by *April 6th. *



Session title: *Power in Translation: Resistance, Resilience, and
Adaptation during Interlingual Interactions*
Organizers: Nicole Nathan and Melissa Krug








*The study of translation practices spans across anthropological subfields
and disciplines. Translation references a “whole family of semiotic
processes” (Gal 2015:225) and at a basic level  involves“the expression in
one semiotic system of what has been said, written, or done in another”
(227). Scholars have identified powerful linguistic ideologies, such as
Reddy’s conduit metaphor (1979) that expect translators to reproduce the
original without influence or change. Such a conceptualization of
translation overlooks the inherent imperfection in linguistic transfer as
well as the translators’ background, positionality, and agency. Further
challenging notions of “fluency”, Heller (2007) and other scholars of
bilingualism and multilingualism have demonstrated the ways that languages,
dialects, and registers cannot be conceived as bounded entities. What’s
more, translators, in addition to communicating across linguistic forms,
must also act as a broker across cultural contexts (Reynolds and Orellana
2009). As such, translations “rely on ideological framings of
comparison…[that] is always positioned, never politically neutral, never
innocent” (Gal 2015:236). These findings indicate the possibilities for
research on translation practices to broaden our understandings of how
translation mediates interactions that take place across asymmetrical power
relations, related to interlocutors’ unequal social status and stakes in
the interaction. As technological, business, tourist, and other processes
of neoliberal globalization connect people with disparate linguistic and
cultural backgrounds, it has become increasingly imperative to better
understand how translation can be a form of adaptation, one that can create
unifications or divisions. In this panel, we seek to understand how
translation is a device “for creating material persistence and social
connections” (Gal 2015:236). This panel critically examines the ways that
translation, while (re)producing power asymmetries, can also provide
opportunities to negotiate those imbalances and thus serve as a critical
tool for everyday resistance, adaptation and resilience. We welcome papers
that take novel approaches to the study of translation as the
intermediation of various linguistic and cultural processes that treats
language as dynamic, changeable, and complex. We invite papers from a
variety of ethnographic contexts including institutional, informal, and
virtual settings. These papers could explore the translator’s paradoxical
position--as both the object and the voice of the translation--shape the
translation (García-Sánchez et al. 2011), or reflect on the
anthropologist’s own partiality in mediating and recontextualizing the
translation, thereby contributing another element of subjective
interpretation. Papers in this panel address questions such as: What/whose
messages are translated and which are left untranslated? What does a
translation tell us about power asymmetries, social relations, and language
ideologies? How can translation be a tool for everyday resistance? How has
access to technology, such as Google translate, affected translation
practices and the role of the translator as a mediator? Keywords:
translation, interpretation, mediation, cultural broker, translanguaging,
bilingualism, cross-cultural encounter, tourism, healthcare, religion,
development, NGOs*
Thank you and see you in San Jose,

Melissa Krug
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
Anthropology; Doctoral Candidate
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