Слово.ру: балтийский акцент (Feb 2022)
Ethnography in Translation Studies: an object and a research methodology
Abstract
Based on a review of the literature on ethnography produced by translation scholars over the past twenty years, this contribution explores how translation studies [TS] has appropriated this concept, first as a way to solve translation problems (with Eugene Nida), then as an object (within the cultural turn) and more recently as a research methodology to document and analyze translation and interpreting events in context. The author shows how, in the early seventies, both cultural anthropology and TS saw a change in paradigm that brought the two disciplines closer at the surface level (as the metaphor of culture as a text gained grounds), but that draw them very much apart from an epistemological viewpoint. Indeed, while ethnography was undertaking an interpretive turn, TS chose to define itself as an empirical discipline based on systematic and objective observation; this positivistic bias in early TS could partly explain its late adoption of ethnography as a research methodology. This literary review finally reminds us of the many dichotomies out of which TS has grown and structured itself — text vs context; translation vs. interpretation; experiential vs. scientific knowledge, hermeneutics vs. empiricism, to name but a few — and suggest the need for an interpretive move within the discipline.
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