Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies by Helle V. Dam Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger Karen Korning Zethsen

Author:Helle V. Dam,Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger,Karen Korning Zethsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

‘Professionalism’, boundary work, and TIS

Encouraged by sociological perspectives of the field, TIS scholars have been attracted to studying translators and interpreters as professional agents situated in a plexus of cultural, social, political, and economic contexts (cf. overviews in Grbić 2015 and in Sela-Sheffy 2016). In addition to the interest in translators and interpreters as an occupational group, the phenomena of ‘natural’, ‘non-professional’, and/or ‘volunteer’ translators/interpreters have recently come to the fore.

It is well-known that TIS has experienced a wealth of turns or Neuorientierungen in the past 40 years, all of them both signifying and strengthening its fundamental nature as an inter-discipline and at the same time drawing attention to the dynamics of its thematic, conceptual, and methodological boundaries. These moves across traditional disciplinary boundaries have not only brought about new ways of collecting and arranging observations and descriptions surrounding the phenomena of ‘translation’ and ‘interpreting’; they have also changed the ways of “organizing a community (with gatekeeping mechanisms)” as pointed out by Gambier and van Doorslaer (2016: 8) in their recent volume on disciplinary border crossing. In our view, many of these organising practices and gatekeeping agencies inside TIS can be described in terms of boundary work, featuring all of the rhetorical resources discussed above: expansion of authority through heightening contrast; monopolisation of authority and the processes of exclusion; and protection as expressed through blaming. In these discursive, occasionally coinciding processes surrounding the emancipation of the discipline, the issue of the professionalism of translation and interpreting practice has long been and continues to be one of the core elements.

In what follows, we will demonstrate how boundaries have been set in TIS to draw a mental fence between professionals and non-professionals. Following that, we will discuss the challenges that arose when this boundary was crossed, shifted, or spanned in the course of research turning increasingly towards so-called non-professional translation and interpreting practices.

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