Avenues of translation: The city in Iberian and Latin American writing

Abstract

nities and social sciences has so far been limited, which suggests a paradox: translator scholars have spent decades researching all kinds of translation phenomena and yet the phenomena closest to them have been largely neglected. In their different ways, the essays in this volume all help to redress the balance in pointing to a conception of translators as “translatorial agents” (19) enjoying varying degrees of visibility within academia but invariably recognized as playing a transformative role. Some of the authors (especially Link and Grüning) reflect on the status of academic translators within academia and the value accorded to translation work as a form of research output. Here, further reflection might involve thinking, perhaps from a policy perspective, about the kinds of status granted to translation in research assessment exercises and university courses specializing in translation (especially at graduate level, where academic translation is still given little attention), while also applying a sociological lens to the position of academic translators within the academic field more generally. In other words, where are they positioned within the community? How are they represented (in all senses of the term) in different academic cultures? In either hinting at or providing partial answers to these questions, this volume has set the terms of future work on questions that even those cultures most resistant to the idea of translation as a transformative scholarly endeavor cannot ignore – as the transcultural phenomenon of theory, to name but one example, clearly demonstrates.