Ethnography (Communities of Practice: Rules and Theories)

In this chapter: Translation involves far more than finding target-language equivalents for source-language words and phrases; it also involves dealing with clients, agencies, employers; networking, research, use of technology; and generally an awareness of the roles translation plays in society and society plays in translation. Intuitive leaps: the translator is in many ways a pretender: s/he pretends first of all, early in her or his career, to be a translator, and then, all through his or her career, to be the kind of source reader the source author was writing for and the kind of author that the target reader will trust, and to belong to the appropriate language-use communities. Pattern-building: learning to be an effective and successful professional translator involves above all participating in the community of translators. Rules and theories: there have been two separate “sociological turns” (or two surges in the same sociological turn) in translation studies, one in the mid-1980s in Germany (the skopos or action-oriented or functionalist school) and the turn to sociological theory (especially Bourdieu) and ethnographic research in the 2000s.