Presentation

This issue of TTR brings together eight contributions from scholars who presented their work during the “Translation and Minority” series of international conferences organized at the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation in late 2016 and 2017. Three years later or so, the topic of minorness is as relevant as it has ever been, stirring productive debate, for instance, in the “Translating Minorities and Conflict” conference jointly run by the Universidad de Córdoba and Università degli Studi di Trieste in June 2020, and in a recent issue of TTR guest-edited by Denise Merkle and Gillian Lane-Mercier, “Minorité, migration et rencontres interculturelles : du binarisme à la complexité/Minority and Migrant Intercultural Encounters: From Binarisms to Complexity.” Besides the huge research potential that so-called “minor” contexts present and the fact that they have started to gain ground only in the recent history of the discipline, there are two other reasons, I argue, for this continued interest in minorness. First, the use of a biased, dichotomous qualifier like “minor” continues undeterred in Translation Studies (TS). Sometimes language fails us and we settle for a certain word for lack of a better one. It is the case of “minor,” “minority,” “minoritized,” and “minorness,” which have been questioned by translation scholars and practitioners over the years—and rightfully so. Various other phrases have been proposed, such as “small”/“lesser used”/“lesser translated”/“local” languages and cultures (Folaron, 2015; Branchadell and West, 2005; Lane-Mercier, 2014) or even “languages spoken by few,” suggested by Icelandic neo-surrealist poet Sjón when talking about the threat of English over an isolated language like Icelandic. Sjón also notes that “[i]f the Divine Comedy can be translated into Faroese, then the Faroese language is big enough to accommodate it—proving to be as big as Dante’s Italian” (cited in Billey, n.d., n.p.). Second, translation is no longer seen as a gap in value, but as a gap in resources (Cronin, 2013), a gap that we become aware of due to today’s increased mobility. Unlike cultural stability, being culturally mobile (or a nomad) is a precarious state in itself. Away from “home,” translators take stock of the novelty of other contexts and strive to bring such novelty to their own cultures. A precariousness in means asks for translation in order to close the gap; as such, translation departs from precarious contexts and is fueled by precarious states. Understood as a desire for change, precariousness is paramount for establishing positive relationships with other cultures and energizing the local scenes, rather than simply reflecting a “minor” mode of existence in the global economic and geopolitical arenas. Before presenting each of the eight contributions that made possible this issue, I will provide an overview of the concept of “minor language/culture” in TS and emphasize the way in which it has reshaped the discipline over the past few years. I will place the discussion within a complexity framework that sees translation as an inter- and intracultural transfer process (Espagne and Werner, 1988) that is very sensitive to its initial conditions of production and reliant on its translator’s agency, thus highly non-linear (Marais, 2015; Marais and Meylaerts, 2018). The multifaceted roles played by translators in any given culture, the manifold relationships cultures may establish among them, and the granulated social reality of the new millennium invite a vision of translation beyond binary thought, as an act that is essentially simultaneously and irreducibly linguistic, cultural, and social, but also individual and collective, material and virtual, online and offline. Translation Studies is one of the most open and most interdisciplinary areas of academic inquiry and is “bound to expand” (van Doorslaer, 2018b). Yet, …