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Article published In: Legal and institutional translation: Functions, processes, competences
Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Target 33:2] 2021
► pp. 282–307

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A case study of unquiet translators

Relating legal translators’ subservient and subversive habitus to socialization

ORCiD logo with link | Universitat Jaume I
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 4 June 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.21069.mon
Abstract
Remarkable efforts have been made in Translation and Interpreting Studies to test the subservient habitus hypothesis formulated by Simeoni, Daniel. 1998. “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target 10 (1): 1–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar in his seminal work. In the face of increasing evidence that translators tend to reproduce a given society’s or community’s prevalent norms and contribute to the stability of such norms (Toury, Gideon. 1978. “The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation.” In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Translation, edited by James S. Holmes, José Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck, 83–100. Leuven: Acco.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), subversive translation practices have been reported (Delabastita, Dirk. 2011. “Continentalism and the Invention of Traditions in Translation Studies.” In Eurocentrism in Translation Studies, edited by Luc van Doorslaer and Peter Flynn, special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 6 (2): 142–156. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Woods, Michelle. 2012. “Framing Translation: Adolf Hoffmeister’s Comic Strips, Travelogues, and Interviews as Introductions to Modernist Translations.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 71: 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and indeed promoted as a way of fostering social and cultural change (Levine, Suzanna Jill. 1991. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, insights into how translators’ subservient or subversive habitus develop and depart from each other are still lacking. In order to shed light on this gray area, this article scrutinizes the contrasts between the habitus of professional legal translators who acquiesce to and who reject the norms governing their positions in the field. Special attention is given to those who decide to abandon the translation field. Their behavior is examined by relating habitus to forms of socialization and studying the implications of their strategies. Based on a case study drawn from interview data, this article focuses on the social practices of resistance and rebellion vis-à-vis subservience, and the impact of both on translation workplaces, work processes, and translators’ futures.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Facing the unexpected
  • 2.Habitus and behavior
    • 2.1Working with habitus in TIS
    • 2.2Interest: An essential ingredient of a successful habitus
    • 2.3Decaying orbits and going astray
  • 3.Translators’ habitus: Studying the submissive and the subversive
    • 3.1Institutional conditions and personal paths
      • 3.1.1Presenting the interviews
      • 3.1.2Introducing the participants
    • 3.2Analyzing conflicts, acquiescence, and dissent
      • 3.2.1Negotiating text-based translation decisions
      • 3.2.2Negotiating institutional workflows
      • 3.2.3Abandoning the field
  • 4.Discussion: Harnessing the interaction between habitus and field
    • 4.1Fine-tuning the concept of socialization to understand translators
    • 4.2Competing doxas
    • 4.3Socialization and adherence to doxas and illusios
    • 4.4Power as mediator of illusios
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
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