Publications

Publication details [#26475]

Vidal Claramonte, Mª Carmen África. 2014. The historian as translator: applying Pierre Bourdieu to the translation of history. In Vorderobermeier, Gisella, ed. Remapping habitus in Translation Studies (Approaches to Translation Studies 40). Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp. 203–217.
Publication type
Article in jnl/bk
Publication language
English
Person as a subject

Abstract

The starting point of this essay is the presupposition that “objective” history is never anything but a signifier protected by the apparent omnipotence of the referent, that facts do not have meaning by themselves, but are given one form a determined ideology, and that therefore history and translation are meaning systems through which we construct the meaning of the past. In this essay the author will apply Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and symbolic capital to demonstrate that history is a way to translate reality which selects documents and facts by means of maneuvers charged with ideological implications. The historian thus becomes a rewriter and history turns out to be an act of translation. All this is exemplified by the historian Luis Suárez’s entry on Francisco Franco in the Diccionario biográfico español published by the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia.
Source : Abstract in book