Critical discourse analysis and translation studies: translation, recontextualiation, ideology

Abstract

This paper explores the role that critical discourse-analytical concepts such as recontextualization, strategy and ideology might play in theorizing translation practice. It also relates translation-as-recontextualization to the sociological concepts of field and agency-structure dialectic. Translations may function at once in the cultural and the political field, and may thus be part of political strategies of resistance and (de)legitimation. Social actors’ strategies for action are however inherently constrained by the structural properties of the recontextualizing field, understood as a field of forces, of contests for different forms of (cultural, economic, political) capital. There is, in any context, an agency-structure dialectic that will govern the way in which a text is recontextualized from one cultural context into another, as well as particular relations between fields (for instance, the cultural field may be heavily ideologized and politicized, or relatively independent from the political field). These structural properties will affect translation practices and will be manifest in textual features of translated texts.

Keywords

• critical discourse analysis
• political field
• recontextualization
• strategy
• translation studies