2007_parada_fouces_review英文版本.pdf

Arturo Parada Oscar Diaz Fouces (eds) Sociology of Translation. Vigo: Servizio de Publicaciones do Universidade de Vigo, 2006. I hate to quibble, but surely the title needs an article? It could be The Sociology of Translation, if only there were something definitive about the discipline. Or perhaps A Sociology of Translation, if there were a coherent approach clearly emerging from the ten articles brought together here. Or even Some Sociology of Translation, suggesting this is part of a larger whole, which is not really the case either. So we shall settle for the linguistic calque, which could be from any number of Germanic or Romance languages (Sociologie de la traduction is indeed the title of a recent book). But we would still have preferred “aspects of…”, “approaches to...”, “towards...”, or even “for...”, to make it very clear that we are not quite where we want to be. Those are not mere quibbles. If we accept that sociology concerns large-scale relations between people and groups of people, then only a minority of the articles in this book are immediately sociological. And the one that is most clearly sociological— Joachim Renn on communication and governance in fragmented societies—does not actually concern translation in anything more than a metaphorical sense. Here lies the rub. In German, the term Translationssoziologie (more rarely Übersetzungssoziologie) can and is being used for a way of viewing as translation all meaning-transformation that occurs in communication between social groups (as indeed is the case in Renn’s article). In French, the term Sociologie de la traduction similarly adopts translation as a conveniently vague metaphor for the way communication can be studied within the frame of actor-network theory. Within Translation Studies (which might be another language), a conference at Graz in 2006 explicitly undertook to build a bridge with those newish forms of sociology. By the way, that conference produced a