A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article attempts to adapt Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of symbolic goods to translation by highlighting points of convergence between the reflections of the sociologist and questions of translation. Founded upon a theory of action, Bourdieu’s sociology allows for an integration of translation practice into his heuristic model. The practice of translation, like every practice in Bourdieu’s terms, is based upon a coincidence of two instances (generally separated by scholars): the external instance of literary texts (what we have customarily called the literary institution and what Bourdieu calls the fields) and the internal instance (textual productions and products, the producing agents and their ‘habitus’). Using examples from American literature translated in France in the 19th and 20th centuries, this paper analyzes the effect on translation of the existence, or nonexistence, of American and French literary fields, with emphasis on the censorship that the judicial fields attempted to impose upon the literary field during the period under consideration. It then analyzes the ‘habitus’ of a number of translators (Coindreau, Vian and Duhamel) and the way in which their social trajectories developed. Finally, it is suggested that the ‘illusio’ is ultimately the object of the translator’s task. Governed by the principle of homology, translation is the work of a translator who, embodied in his or her bi-cultural ‘habitus’, imports the foreign text into the target culture, thus orienting this culture towards a new social future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".