Sela-Sheffy Rakefet, Shlesinger Miriam. Identity and Status in the Translational Professions

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011. — 297 p.This volume contributes to the emerging research on the social formation of translators and interpreters as specific occupational groups. Despite the rising academic interest in sociological perspectives in Translation Studies, relatively little research has so far been devoted to translators’ social background, status struggles and sense of self. The articles assembled here zoom in on the “groups of individuals” who perform the complex translating and/or interpreting tasks, thereby creating their own space of cultural production. Cutting across varied translatorial and geographical arenas, they reflect a view of the interrelatedness between the macro-level question of professional status and micro-level aspects of practitioners’ identity. Addressing central theoretical issues relating to translators’ habitus and role perception, as well as methodological challenges of using qualitative and quantitative measures, this endeavor also contributes to the critical discourse on translators’ agency and ethics and to questions of reformulating their social role.Rakefet Sela-Sheffy and Miriam Shlesinger — Introduction
Esther Monzó — Legal and translational occupations in Spain: Regulation and specialization in jurisdictional struggles
Andy Lung Jan Chan — Effectiveness of translator certification as a signaling device: Views from the translator recruiters
Franz Pöchhacker — Conference interpreting: Surveying the profession
David Katan — Occupation or profession: A survey of the translators’ world
Robin Setton and Alice Guo Liangliang — Attitudes to role, status and professional identity in interpreters and translators with Chinese in Shanghai and Taipei
Cornelia Zwischenberger — Conference interpreters and their self-representation: A worldwide webbased survey
Reine Meylaerts — Habitus and self-image of native literary author-translators in diglossic societies
Hannah Amit-Kochavi — The people behind the words: Professional profiles and activity patterns of translators of Arabic literature into Hebrew (1896–2009)
Elena Baibikov — Revised translations, revised identities: (Auto)biographical contextualization of translation
Kumiko Torikai — Conference interpreters and their perception of culture: From the narratives of Japanese pioneers
Ruth Morris — Images of the court interpreter: Professional identity, role definition and self-image
Claudia V. Angelelli — A professional ideology in the making: Bilingual youngsters interpreting for their communities and the notion of (no) choice
Nadja Grbić — “Boundary work” as a concept for studying professionalization processes in the interpreting field
Şebnem Bahadır — The task of the interpreter in the struggle of the other for empowerment: Mythical utopia or sine qua non of professionalism?