Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Over the last years, several conferences and publications in Translation Studies have dealt with ‘Eurocentrism’ as one of their central topics or subtopics, often combined with an attempt to elaborate on the social relevance of both translation and the related scholarly discipline from an explicitly non-European or, in other cases, intercontinental perspective. This paper will analyze part of the discourse used at these conferences and in these publications. The starting point often is the supposed dominance or superiority of Eurocentric reflection in Translation Studies that subsequently is rejected on the basis of the assumption that the old European models are too static to cover modern cultural and multicultural realities. In most of these cases, a clear antagonistic perspective on European vs. non-European or non-European based research is adopted. It seems somewhat strange that all but subtle geographical or continental categories are introduced with an explanatory aim. To what extent is Eurocentrism to be perceived as an inevitable concept resulting from the development of a discipline? To what extent is it also a constructed or at least constructable concept? Should a European Society for whatever studies be tempted to become less European? The answers to these questions might have a considerable impact on how translation and the related scholarly discipline are perceived and what their role is considered to be in society and culture on different continents. Particularly in a phase of growing institutionalization of the discipline (more journals, more bibliographies, more handbooks etc.), these questions relate to the way scholars conceptualize and theorize translation both as an activity and as an area of study. In the context of translating in American cultures for instance, Edwin Gentzler states that “translation is less something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more something that is constitutive of those cultures" (2008:5). This paper will confront such views with the different uses of the Eurocentrism concept in the last years.
Source: Lirias
Author: Luc van Doorslaer
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2524076775