Sociolinguistics and translation

Sara Ramos Pinto
University of Turku
Table of contents

The development of Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline has, at times, been marked by an (already plentifully diagnosed) tension between linguistic and cultural approaches to translation. Fortunately, it is now frequently acknowledged that both disciplines have much to offer to each other, thus rendering such a dichotomy largely obsolete. Regarding the particular case of Sociolinguistics, it is important to first contextualise the attention given to it by translation scholars within a broader functional and communicative approach to text during the 1980s and 1990s along with the turn from structural to functional linguistics. One of the central criticisms of linguistic approaches to TS is in the underlying assumption that meaning is stable, as well as independent of language and culture. Such a view is in stark opposition to Sociolinguistics, which understands meaning as dynamic, subjective and context-dependent, as briefly explored in the following section.

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