Habitus and self-image of native literary author-translators in diglossic societies

Since in many cases past and present the professional translation field is not — or is only weakly — differentiated, the transposability of dispositions acquired through experiences related both to other fields and to translators’ larger life conditions and social trajectory may play a fundamental role in a translator’s habitus. Research on translators’ socio-biographies therefore deserves special attention. For native literary author-translators who live and work in a diglossic society characterized by socio-linguistic conflicts between the translators’ working languages, the plural and dynamic internalization of this conflict and of broader linguistic and cultural hierarchies is likely to form one of the constitutive aspects of their habitus and self-image, of their literary and translational behavior. In the first part of this article, I propose a tentative typology of Belgian native author-translators’ habitus and self-image according to potentially different internalizations of the Belgian linguistic conflict in their broader socialization process. In the second part, I present relevant aspects of the socio-biography of Camille Melloy, a native literary author-translator who translated between conflicting cultures in early twentieth century Belgium.