A Sociological Approach in Translation: Burdieu’s Concepts of Field and Habitus

It was in 1972 when James Holmes, during The Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics from Copenhagen, drawing an outline of the Translation Studies field, spoke of ‘a sociology of translation’ (1972). He argued that, as a branch of Function-oriented DTS, it would ideally focus on ‘the description of [translations] function in the recipient socio-cultural situation’ (ibid.), and it would therefore consist of a study not of texts, but of their contexts and their influence on a certain social environment. Nonetheless, it has been during the past ten years that sociological approaches started to become a field of interest, due to the work of scholars like Pierre Burdieu, Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhman (Inghilleri 2008). That is not to say however that interests in this matter had not been previously taken, for it is considered that the basis of Translation Sociology branch is Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and Gideon Toury’s Cultural Planning concept.

In his paper ‘A Bourdesian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances’, Jean-Marc Guoanvic makes a succinct description of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of symbolic goods and how can it be adapted to translation practices. The theory revolves around the coincidence of two instances in a given social context: external, which represents the – in our case, literary – field, and internal, which consists of textual productions and products, the producing agents and their habitus. Burdieu emphasizes on the idea that these two instances should not be taken separately, for ‘there exists neither internal nor external dimensions, but a concurrence of both’ (Gouanvic; 2005:148), but should be considered as a two-way relationship where the habitus contributes to the structuring of fields, which in turn structure the habitus.

Speaking of habitus, this is a concept coined by Burdieu to define an individual’s ‘embodied dispositions’ (Inghilleri 2008:280), which are acquired throughout time and which shift according to his or her social and biological trajectory. The fields, on the other hand, are social micro cosmoses, sites where different forms of symbolic and material capital are disseminated. Through Burdieu’s theory the individual and the society are - perhaps for the first time - brought together, and, finally, a (re)conciliation occurs between the subjective and the objective, something that previous scholars in Translation Studies haven’t manage to fully achieve. Fields are therefore objective, dynamic sites that interrelate with each other, but contain in the same time a subjective aspect, that is, a display of confrontations between various forces, which aim to become dominant. This is the crossroad where Toury’s concept of norms failed to become operative, because it offered static frames of various occurrences ‘frozen’ in time, whereas using the notion of force one may trace the origins of that occurrence and how it shifted throughout time. One good example which can be interpreted from both Toury’s and Bordieu’s concepts is an instance of translation practices in Romania during the nineteenth century. From the look taken at the works translated and published in the newspapers of the time – they were published in episodes, the so-called feuilleton – one could infer that, judging from a quantitative perspective, the norm was to translate light, easy-reading literature (Kohn 2008:536). What was the cause and the outcome wouldn’t matter from this point of view, and it would be easy to assume that the Romanian readership as a whole simply enjoyed that one type of literature. Taking into account Bourdieu’s theory however, the context is enlarged, and one can also look at the fact that there were heated debates among the literary scholars of the time, who argued that high literature should be translated and published in the newspapers instead, as a way to literate the masses. It was through the decision of a prominent writer and translator, Ion Heliade-Radulescu - who believed that the common Romanian reader was not ready to understand and assimilate international masterpieces, yet still needed to be motivated to read – that ephemeral literary works started to appear in the periodicals of the time. We can therefore speak of the struggle between two forces – that of promoting high or low literature, respectively – in the field of novel Romanian translation from the 19th century, and of the role played by the agent - Heliade-Radulescu - and his habitus, that is, his academic background, his understanding of the culture’s needs, and his power to disseminate the products (he was the founder of several cultural periodicals).

References:

GOUANVIC, Jean-Marc (2005) ‘A Bourdesian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances’, The Translator. Volume 11, No2, 147-166

HOLMES, James (1972) ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, http://www.prevajalstvo.net/files/upload/File/the%20name%20and%20nature%20of%20translation%20studies.pdf

INGHILLERI, Moira (2008), ‘Sociological Approaches’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies By Mona Baker and Gabriela Sadanha, Second Edition

KOHN, Janos (2008), ‘Romanian Tradition’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies By Mona Baker and Gabriela Sadanha, Second Edition