Chapter 8

Of places, spaces, and faces

The contemporary translation economy of our globalizing digital world is deeply intertwined with information and communication technologies and the Internet, with the once separate sphere of machine translation lately converging more tangibly and impactfully with translation and interpreting practices as we have traditionally understood them. The decisions on what to translate, and by whom, why, where, and when, have always been conditioned by ideology, politics, economies, and the diverse power structures and dynamics at play in society. The Internet has brought with it the growth of a “parallel” world of human social and cultural practices in digital form, one where the display and dissemination of knowledge are intimately linked to the presence, visibility, and representation on the Web of one’s language and culture, both through native language use in communication and through practices of translation and localization. Analogous to material and physical territorial geographic spaces, virtual spaces reflect tensions and asymmetries of power. In this chapter we discuss these linguistic and translational relationships of asymmetry through the prism of digital world technologies and economies, and their implications for lesser-used and low- or no-resourced language groups. This discussion is followed by examples from two contexts: firstly, the broader Indigenous territorial context of First Nations peoples in Canada; and secondly, the Arctic Indigenous cross-territorial circumpolar groups of Inuit peoples in Canada.