Article published in:
Legal and institutional translation: Functions, processes, competences
Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Target 33:2] 2021
► pp. 282–307

A case study of unquiet translators

Relating legal translators’ subservient and subversive habitus to socialization

| Universitat Jaume I
Remarkable efforts have been made in Translation and Interpreting Studies to test the subservient habitus hypothesis formulated by Simeoni (1998) in his seminal work. In the face of increasing evidence that translators tend to reproduce a given society’s or community’s prevalent norms and contribute to the stability of such norms (Toury 1978), subversive translation practices have been reported (Delabastita 2011; Woods 2012) and indeed promoted as a way of fostering social and cultural change (Levine 1991; Venuti 1992). However, insights into how translators’ subservient or subversive habitus develop and depart from each other are still lacking. In order to shed light on this gray area, this article scrutinizes the contrasts between the habitus of professional legal translators who acquiesce to and who reject the norms governing their positions in the field. Special attention is given to those who decide to abandon the translation field. Their behavior is examined by relating habitus to forms of socialization and studying the implications of their strategies. Based on a case study drawn from interview data, this article focuses on the social practices of resistance and rebellion vis-à-vis subservience, and the impact of both on translation workplaces, work processes, and translators’ futures.
Keywords: legal translation, socialization, translators’ habitus, subversive habitus, deviant behavior, interviews, workplace studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Facing the unexpected
  • 2.Habitus and behavior
    • 2.1Working with habitus in TIS
    • 2.2Interest: An essential ingredient of a successful habitus
    • 2.3Decaying orbits and going astray
  • 3.Translators’ habitus: Studying the submissive and the subversive
    • 3.1Institutional conditions and personal paths
      • 3.1.1Presenting the interviews
      • 3.1.2Introducing the participants
    • 3.2Analyzing conflicts, acquiescence, and dissent
      • 3.2.1Negotiating text-based translation decisions
      • 3.2.2Negotiating institutional workflows
      • 3.2.3Abandoning the field
  • 4.Discussion: Harnessing the interaction between habitus and field
    • 4.1Fine-tuning the concept of socialization to understand translators
    • 4.2Competing doxas
    • 4.3Socialization and adherence to doxas and illusios
    • 4.4Power as mediator of illusios
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 04 June 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.21069.mon
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A case study of unquiet translators