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A Translational Sociology provides an interdisciplinary investigation of the key role of translation in society. There is a growing recognition of translation's intervention in the intellectual history of sociology, in the international reception of social theory, and in approaches to the global literary and academic fields. This book brings attention to aspects of translation that have remained more elusive to sociological interpretation and analysis, investigating translation's ubiquitous presence in the everyday lives of ordinary people in increasingly multilingual societies and its key intervention in mediating politics within and beyond the nation. In order to challenge a reductive view of translation as a relatively straightforward process of word substitution that is still prevalent in the social sciences, this book proposes and develops a broader definition of translation as a social relation across linguistic difference, a process of transformation that leaves neither its agent nor its object unchanged. The book offers elaborations of the social, cultural and political implications of such an approach, as a broad focus on these various perspectives and their interrelations is needed for a fuller understanding of translation's significance in the contemporary world. This is key reading for advanced students and researchers of translation studies, social theory, cultural sociology and political sociology.

This article focusses on Walter Benjamin's approach to the experience of modernity through his long-term engagement with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Benjamin translated Baudelaire and produced a theoretical reflection on translation based on this experience in his essay 'The Task of the Translator'. Years later, he would place Baudelaire at the centre of his attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modernity in his great unfinished work The Arcades Project. This article brings to light the relationship between translating and interpreting Baudelaire in Benjamin's work, attempting to recover a systematicity in his thought that escapes from traditional disciplinary borders. In order to do so, it reads Benjamin's essay on 'The Task of the Translator' in light of major issues that can only be clarified with reference to his later adoption of historical materialism and, conversely, it approaches Benjamin's interpretation of Baudelaire as the writer of modern life as a revision of philosophical concerns that were first approached in his metaphysics of language and translation. A concluding section explores how such an interpretation relates to a materialist physiognomics which puts language and translation at the heart of a critique of modernity.

This essay interrogates ignored works of art as a special kind of object that can shed some light on the nature of contemporary art worlds, as well as on wider social processes regarding our relationship with things and with our past. It provides a materialist perspective focused on discarded objects as an alternative to a mystifying view of the artworld that takes artistic autonomy for granted and obliterates the social conditions of creativity and success. Ignored works are normally outside the reach of art history and the sociology of art, yet the increasingly bigger realm of unrecognized and unvalued art provides, after the failure of the historical avant-garde, a space where critical autonomy can still develop. This essay attempts to illuminate this mostly invisible realm by relating it to other similar categories such as waste and forgetting. Finally, ignored works' connection to notions of authenticity is pointed out.

This article argues for a non-reductive approach to translation as a basic social process that shapes both the world that sociologists study and the sociological endeavour itself. It starts by referring to accounts from the sociology of translation and translation studies, which have problematized simplistic views of processes of cultural globalization. From this point of view, translation can offer an approach to contemporary interconnectedness that escapes from both methodological nationalism and what can be designated as the monolingual vision, providing substantive perspectives on the proliferation of contact zones or borderlands in a diversity of domains. The article centrally argues for a sociological perspective that examines not just the circulation of meaning but translation as a process of linguistic transformation that is necessarily embodied in words. Only if this more material aspect of translation is attended to can the nature of translation as an ordinary social process be fully grasped and its intervention in meaning-making activities explored. This has far-ranging implications for any reflexive account of the production of sociological works and interpretations.

AbstractThis article examines how debates on language and democracy have been differently framed within multiculturalist and cosmopolitan frameworks, questioning some of their underlying assumptions and demonstrating a basic continuity with reference to what is approached as the monolingual vision. It then goes on to propose an alternative conception of the language of democracy based on plurilingualism, linguistic hospitality, and translation. Such a conception is not ignorant of the social role of language in the constitution of individual selves and of collective identities, nor does it avoid confronting the politics of language in a highly unequal global space. It recognizes that the grounds of a cosmopolitan democracy can only be built through generalized plurilingual exchanges and sees in the difficulties of understanding and the productive confrontation with the opacity of others and of ourselves the very substance of democracy amongst diversity. This approach also points in the direction of a cosmopolitan sociology that bridges political cosmopolitanism with forms of literary and artistic cosmopolitanism that have remained rather marginal in cosmopolitan thought.

Theodor Adorno has often been portrayed as the prototypical example of the permanent exile, even though, after living fifteen years in Britain and the US, he returned to Germany in 1949 and spent the last twenty years of his life there. This article traces Adorno's reflections on his homecoming and analyses how his experiences of exile and return shaped his mature thought. Conceiving homecoming not simply as a return to one's origins but as a continuation of a radical experience of the foreign, it builds on the remarkable continuity of Adorno's theory of intellectual experience over time. The article also explores homecoming in relation to Adorno's thought on language and translation, an aspect that has been little studied in the existing literature, both in terms of the articulation of a philosophy of language where the foreign plays an important role, and in terms of how language and translation were directly connected with Adorno's return.

Whereas globalization theory was predominantly silent about the role of translation in making possible the flow of information worldwide, assuming instant communicability and transparency, translation has gained central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism that emphasize global interdependence and the negotiation of difference. In this context, a specification of translation processes provides a way of analysing the form in which interactions between different modernities take place and of specifying a notion of cosmopolitanism as internalization of the other. This article approaches translation as much more than the linguistic transfer of information from one language to another. Widely defined as the experience or the test of the foreign, a process which mobilizes our whole relationship to the other, translation appears as a material, concrete practice through which cosmopolitanism, conceived as openness to the world and to others, can be empirically examined. After having thus identified the central role of translation in a cosmopolitan context, the article examines how it can be used to approach current notions of aesthetic or artistic cosmopolitanism with reference to the key notion of world literature. Finally, it outlines the most important implications that a conception of cosmopolitanism as translation has for cosmopolitan social theory.

AbstractThe global media play a fundamental role in contemporary globalization, making possible instant communication and promoting an experience of global connectedness. The globalization of media communications has deeply shaped the modern journalistic field in the last 150 years and, at the same time, global news organizations have been instrumental in creating the very conditions that have made globalization possible. In this article I explore the relationship between globalization and the media and trace the historical development of the field of global news, examining in detail the role and trajectories of its most important players, the global news agencies, and highlighting significant parallels between nineteenth‐century globalization and the processes that have led to increased global connectedness in the past decades. I also devote some attention to the more recent developments in the field of global news and the appearance of new types of media organizations.

Power, language, and translation -- Globalization and translation -- Globalization and news : the role of the news agencies in historical perspective -- Translation in global news agencies -- Journalism and translation : practices, strategies, and values in the news agencies -- Reading translated news : an analysis of agency texts -- Translation and trust.

La traducción tiene una relevancia central en las teorías recientes sobre el cosmopolitismo que subrayan la interdependencia global y la interacción entre culturas y tradiciones distintas. En este contexto, es necesario formular una política de la traducción que cuestione algunos presupuestos idealistas sobre la traducción presentes en la literatura sociológica, que especifique la traducción como un acto fundamentalmente etnocéntrico y que proponga estrategias relevantes para enfrentarse a este etnocentrismo y para abrir la traducción a la diferencia del otro. Esta política consiste en la extensión de una ética de la traducción basada en la hospitalidad lingüística, de modo que permita plantear conflictos, asimetrías y desigualdades culturales a un nivel social más amplio y buscar respuestas políticas y normativas al respecto en una dirección cosmopolita. Desde esta perspectiva, también se aborda la relevancia de una política de la traducción como alternativa a una política de la identidad. ; Translation has gained a central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism which emphasise global interdependence and the interaction between different cultures and traditions. In this context, it becomes necessary to formulate a politics of translation that questions some idealist assumptions about translation that are present in the sociological literature, specifies translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act, and formu-lates relevant strategies to confront this inherent ethno-centrism in order to open up translation to the difference of the other. Such politics consists in an extension of an ethics of translation based on linguistic hospitality, so that cultural asymmetries, inequalities and conflicts at a wider social level are addressed and political and normative responses to them can be devised from a cosmopolitan perspective. In this light, the relevance of a politics of translation as an alternative to a politics of identity is approached.