Translating fantasy fiction : the role of Translation Agency from a sociological perspective

Ever since the “cultural turn" of translation studies in the early 1990s, research in this field has focused its attention on examining translations contextually. The increasing consideration of cultural relevance led translation studies in a new direction. Therefore, scholars deployed methodologies from other disciplines, such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, etc., to examine translation phenomena. Yet, translation scholars later discovered that the absence of consideration for the role of translation agencies limits a comprehensive understanding of translation as a socially generated product, resulting in recent attempts to understand translation from a sociological perspective. This perspective focuses on the translation agencies themselves and the factors that influence them. The present paper studies the role of translation agencies involved in the production of translation, as well as how the social structure constructs the production of translation through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological model by conducting a case study of the phenomenon of fantasy fiction translation in the Taiwan region. The implications of the results are twofold. First, it is discovered that translators of fantasy fiction were influenced by the logic of the market in the literary field in Taiwan. Second, the data provided in the study reveal that translators accumulated more cultural than economic capital.

自20世纪90年代以降，翻译研究进入了"文化转向"，翻译学者着重探讨翻译的文化脉落，翻译研究自此迈入一个新阶段。翻译学者也借用文化研究、后殖民研究、性别研究等研究方法来探讨翻译现象。然而，因缺乏探讨"翻译者行为者" (translation agency) 这一环节，使得翻译现象无法得到通盘了解，故近期以社会学视角来探讨翻译现象愈来愈受到重视。本研究藉由法国社会学家布迪厄 (Pierre Bourdieu) 的社会学理论，探讨台湾奇幻文学的翻译现象。研究结果发现，奇幻文学翻译的生产受到台湾文学场域主流文学生成模式影响，而译者取得的文化资本多过于经济资本。