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Part of
Border Crossings: Translation Studies and other disciplines
Edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer
[Benjamins Translation Library 126] 2016
► pp. 49–72

Military history and translation studies

Shifting territories, uneasy borders

| University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu
| University of Reading

Both translation studies and military history are disciplines which occupy radically shifting territories, and it has been at their currently uneasy borders that this conversation on transdisciplinarity has been conducted. The move from culturally as well as socially visible translational contexts to non-hegemonic social actors and ordinary lives provides us with a space in which the traditional monolingual assumptions of military history can be challenged, and in which the military terrain as a space of encounter can be reimagined as a linguistically embodied landscape. Combining the historian’s concern to take account of the particularities of any situation with the translation scholar’s desire to address the multilingualism of war potentially moves these disciplines beyond their traditional frontiers, forcing both of them to grapple with the messiness and disruptions which characterise any war and conflict ‘on the ground’.

Keywords: linguistic landscapes, military interpreters, practitioners, translation cultures, war
Published online: 14 September 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.126.03kuj
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