School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Trust and Cooperation through Social Media: COVID-19 translations for Chinese communities in Melbourne
    Pym, A ; Hu, B ; Lee, TK ; Wang, D (Routledge, 2022-01-01)
    A pandemic calls for behaviour-change communication: The ethical aim is to have the receiver voluntarily adopt cooperative actions for the wider good of the community. In the case of superdiverse cites, this entails significant translation and mediation across languages and media, since cooperative actions are to no avail if they do not occur in all sections of society. Messages thus have to attract high degrees of trustworthiness. Social media are sites of particular turbulence in this respect for several reasons: (1) They are privileged media for the circulation of dissent; (2) social-media users have high indices of media-comparison behaviour, judging information on one medium in terms of another, thus exhibiting low levels of initial trust; and (3) linguistically diverse communities have electronic media in their first language coming from outside the immediate community, potentially entering into conflict with officially generated and translated information. Here we look at social media use in Melbourne in order to identify instances of trust and distrust in translated pandemic information across several media. We assess the consequences for cooperative behaviour.
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    Conceptual tools in translation history
    Pym, A ; Rundle, C (Routledge, 2021)
    Western translation historiography has developed a set of conceptual tools with which to talk about translations in terms of separate languages, cultures, and texts, with operational maxims for distinguishing translations from non-translations, and translators from authors. Those concepts assume a foundational binarism that became strong in the early modern period in Europe and may be described as the Western translation form. They then moved outwards from Europe, first as a fellow travelertraveller of modernity, and later with the spread of Western translation studies. Translation historians have, nevertheless, become increasingly aware of alternative translation forms that consistently challenge the Western concepts. Here, it is proposed that the wider plurality might be embraced by honing conceptual tools that, for example, do not systematically separate orality and iconic communication from the written text,; that recognize the ways translators seek trust, collaboration, and inclusion in diverse intercultures,; and that work from technologies as the driving forces of translation history. In developing such concepts, translation historians should further recognize that they are responding to the priorities of the present, in a world where electronic media are revealing the historicity of truths once thought eternal.