Community Translation

Mustapha Taibi, Uldis Ozolins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781474221641
• eBook ISBN: 9781474221665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Investigating an important field within translation studies, Community Translation addresses the specific context, characteristics and needs of translation in and for communities. Traditional classifications in the fields of discourse and genre are of limited use to the field of translation studies, as they overlook the social functions of translation. Instead, this book argues for a classification that cuts across traditional lines, based on the social dimensions of translation and the relationships between text producers and audiences. Community Translation discusses the different types of texts produced by public authorities, services and individuals for communities that need to be translated into minority languages, and the socio-cultural issues that surround them. In this way, this book demonstrates the vital role that community translation plays in ensuring communication with all citizens and in the empowerment of minority language speakers by giving them access to information, enabling them to participate fully in society.

1

Community translation: Definitions, characteristics and status quo

1.1 Definitions

Niska (2002: 135) defines community translation as ‘written translation of mainly informative texts, addressed by authorities or institutions to people who do not understand texts in the language of the text producer’. Taibi (2011) clarifies that the materials handled by community translators are not only informative, nor always produced by public institutions. Rather, they may be produced by a number of different social agents such as non-governmental organizations, local or ethnic community leaders, private organizations with an interest in community welfare and development, and so on. For the author, community translation is the translation of:

texts generated by the larger community (society) or by smaller communities (linguistic or ethnic communities within the larger society, local communities, religious groups, etc.) in order to ensure communication with all citizens [and residents] and permit their participation and, therefore, empowerment. (Taibi 2011: 214–15)

In the call for papers of the International Conference on Community Translation, held at the University of Western Sydney from 11 to 13 September 2014, this type of translation was defined as:

translation of different types of texts intended to facilitate communication between public services and people who do not have a good command of mainstream language(s). These texts may be produced by national or local authorities, non-governmental organisations, ethnic community organisations or leaders, neighbourhood associations, or any other social agent.

Like community interpreting, community translation is a service offered at a national or local level to ensure that the members of multilingual societies have access to information and active participation.

Like community interpreting too, community translation is still emerging as a subfield of translation studies. An indicator of this early stage of development is the different names used to refer to it and the quite distant concepts associated with the same term. Community interpreting has been known as liaison interpreting, public service interpreting, dialogue interpreting, cultural interpreting or interlingual mediation. Community translation is also known as public service translation, and each of the two terms is given different meanings by different authors and groups. Community translation, as in the definitions above, is understood as translation for the community, preferably done by qualified translators. However, there are others who use the term to refer to translation by the community for the community, that is to say members of a community of interest translating content for each other’s use; in O’Hagan’s (2011: 14) words, ‘translation performed voluntarily by Internet users and […] usually produced in some form of collaboration often on specific platforms by a group of people forming an online community’. Public service translation is also used in at least two different senses: 1) as equivalent to community translation in the sense of translation for the community, which is the sense given to it in this book; and 2) in the sense of translation relating to foreign affairs and administrative, economic and cultural relations between different countries (between ex-colonies and colonial powers; in Bandia 1998).

For the sake of conceptual clarity, we now propose to enumerate and comment upon various definitions and references regarding community translation to be found in the scholarly literature.

Gouadec (2007: 35) provides a general definition which is close to the definition and scope adopted in this book, except that Gouadec includes interpreting as well:

Community translation encompasses all translating (and interpreting) carried out to facilitate inter-community relations within a given country where diverse linguistic (and cultural) communities cohabit.

With this definition the author acknowledges the common ground between community translation and community interpreting, namely the fact that they are offered locally or nationally to facilitate communication and relations between linguistically and culturally diverse components of the same society.

Gouadec (2007: 38) also defines ‘institutional translation’, which, although involving public services, is quite distinct from community translation. Institutional translation, according to Gouadec, is ‘any translation carried out in the name, on behalf of and for the benefit of institutions’, as is the case in bilingual or multilingual states and organizations such as the United Nations, European institutions, NATO or national ministries (Gouadec 2007: 38). Although translations produced by or for national institutions may overlap with community translation (e.g. general information published in different languages by ministries and government agencies), institutional translation, as defined above, clearly differs from community translation and therefore falls outside the scope of this book.

Reference to interpreting apart, Gouadec’s (2007) first definition (community translation) offers a succinct description of what this subfield of translation consists of. However, the use of the term ‘community’ is not unproblematic. As Pym (2011: 77) points out:

The problem with the reference to ‘community’ is that all translating and interpreting involves communities of one kind or another […] so there is no substantial specificity indicated. Further, the interactions are hardly from within any pristine language community as such: they involve the provision or intrusion of government services, and thus encounters between communities.

For more specificity and clarity, Pym recommends the use of setting labels or institutional terms such as ‘medical’ or ‘court’.

It is true that all types of translation and interpreting involve working within, for and between communities, in different senses of the term. However, the challenge in naming what is referred to as ‘community translation’ or ‘public service translation’ is that work in this area does not include only one or two institutional settings. Community translation involves translation in fields as distinct as healthcare, education, welfare, municipal governance, the environment, and so on. It would therefore be impossible to use specific setting labels or institutional terms without limiting the scope or distorting the essence of community translation, namely that it is translation intended to ensure communication with all citizens and residents and empower minority language speakers by giving them access to information and enabling them to participate in society. Community translation is not exactly the same as medical, scientific, legal or administrative translation. It may intersect with all these, but still not be identical to them.

Pym (2011: 78) also refers to the quite different senses in which the term ‘community translation’ is used by different groups of researchers and practitioners, in particular the sense in which it is used by authors such as O’Hagan (2011) above and the definition provided and adopted in this book:

Community translation: Term used for the practice whereby non-professionals translate software or websites that they actually use (cf. collaborative translation, crowd-sourcing, fan translation, user-based translation, lay translation, citizen translation, etc.). The problem here is that the term can also (in the United Kingdom and Australia, at least) refer to the use of written translation in the areas of ‘community interpreting’, which has so far been quite a different sphere.

As a solution to distinguish the two activities, Pym recommends using ‘volunteer translation’ to refer to O’Hagan’s (2011) sense of ‘community translation’. We believe that this suggestion is appropriate and useful. Alternative names may (and do) include ‘translation crowdsourcing’, ‘user-generated translation’ or ‘collaborative translation’.

Garcia (2014) distinguishes between ‘conventional community translation’, as presented in this book, and what he refers to as ‘community translation 2.0’, which denotes crowdsourced or volunteer translation on the Internet:

Conventional community translation is there to help linguistically disadvantaged minorities gain access to services, and enable them to participate in society on equal footing with prestige-language speakers. Community translation 2.0 is about bypassing the traditional gatekeepers so that everyone can have a public voice. Thus, while their external circumstances are different, both share a core ethos of individual empowerment and social inclusion.

With the above different definitions and views in mind, we would like to conclude this section with a general definition and description of community translation as understood and presented in this book. Within translation studies, community translation is a subfield that covers written language services needed in a variety of situations to facilitate communication between public services and readers of non-mainstream languages. It is a type of translation that is generally associated with a local or national multilingual community, although authors like Lesch (1999: 92) contend that ‘the term community does not refer to a specific geographical community but rather to a type of translational approach whereby the needs of the language-impoverished community, irrespective of its geographical setting, are addressed’ (italics in source).

Situations which require community translation may include historically multilingual societies as well as emerging or temporary diversities arising from migration, natural disasters or armed conflicts. What is common in all these situations is that there is a mainstream community (and language), one or several linguistic and cultural minorities, and a resultant need for mainstream public services to communicate in writing with those minorities and vice versa. Community translation is a language service that ensures the rights of all individuals and communities to public information and services. By so doing, it facilitates and encourages social, economic and political participation. It is a professional activity which is closely related to community engagement, social action and social change.

1.2 Features of community translation

From the definitions provided by Niska (2002), Gouadec (2007) and Taibi (2011), it becomes clear that community translation is a branch of translation which is characterized, arguably more than any other type of translation, by its social mission. Like community interpreting, it bridges the communicative gap between public services and those citizens or residents who do not speak the mainstream language, and thereby improves relations and cohabitation between different social groups; facilitates information flow between mainstream/established community members and less powerful, minority or newcomer members; and provides opportunities for the latter to improve their socio-economic position and participate more effectively in their (new) community. In this section, we will address three main features of community translation: power imbalance, language (im)parity and audience diversity.

1.2.1 Translation and power imbalance

In community interpreting it has become established that communicative situations are usually characterized by a power imbalance between service providers and users (e.g. Gentile et al. 1996; Hale 2007). Community interpreters usually work in triadic (dialogue) situations where there is, on one hand, a service provider invested with institutional power and access to information and, on the other, a member of a linguistic, social and/or ethnic minority who is both relatively powerless in the institutional setting and disadvantaged as a result of the language barrier. The interpreter (and the user) needs to deal with ‘an information gap’ and a ‘status differential between the clients’ (Gentile et al. 1996: 18), together with the resulting asymmetries in participation rights and discourse privileges/disadvantages. In community translation, there is no direct (dialogical) interaction between service provider and user and no strictly interpersonal relation which could be labelled as asymmetrical. Yet, the entire translation process is imbued with power imbalance at a number of levels.

At the first level, community translation services are usually offered to disempowered social groups (local ethnic and/or linguistic minorities, local majorities with less socio-economic and political power, migrants, refugees, and so on). This means that public service text production is mainly carried out in a language other than the languages of those groups, and the extent to which public service texts are made available in the other languages is itself a political decision in the hands of the most powerful group(s), except when individuals, organizations and groups representing less powerful communities take the initiative and decide to produce materials or have them translated. In a number of African countries, for instance, public service texts are made available in English or French – languages of former colonizers and current elites who have had a French or English education – while local languages are either not sufficiently recognized in the administrative system or treated as target languages when a decision is made to translate into them. (See Djité 2008 for an interesting discussion of language policies in Africa, especially in relation to health and education.)

At the second level, as a result of different historical developments and sociopolitical relations, disempowered social groups would usually score lower in terms of human development indicators such as education, literacy and, therefore, access to written information. For example, decades of apartheid and disempowerment of non-whites in South Africa led to a wide gap between them and the dominant group in terms of education, healthcare and social services. Lesch (2004) provides statistics showing that the majority of South Africans with qualifications were white, while most uneducated citizens were black. Servaas van der Berg (2007: 851) refers to census data which shows that ‘[t]he black cohort born in 1920 had on average attained 7.2 fewer years of education than whites, the 1950 cohort 6.0 years less, the 1960 cohort 4.9 years less, the 1970 cohort 3.6 and the 1980 cohort only 2.3 years less’. The author points out that racial inequalities in terms of educational access and attainment have ‘been substantially reduced’, but that in terms of quality a gap still persists, hence the title of his paper, ‘Apartheid’s Enduring Legacy: Inequalities in Education’. The point here is that both the current political and socio-economic situation of a community as well as the underlying historical developments may produce inequalities in education and literacy, which manifest in turn as less access to information for some groups than for others. This would apply regardless of whether members of disadvantaged groups continue to live in their home country or migrate to another and, in many cases, independently of whether the information is translated into their mother tongues or provided in its original language.

At the third level, community texts are often public service in nature, with official discourse, specialized terminology and a relatively high register. At a discourse level, users of community translations are normally less powerful than the text producer (public institutions) because of the gap in specialized knowledge and access to specialized terminology. At the same time, they are on an unequal footing with other social groups, not only because they do not speak (the) mainstream language(s) but also because of educational gaps (as pointed out in the paragraph above) or language imparity (see the section below).

As will be discussed in Chapter 3, this multidimensional imbalance poses a number of questions relating to the community translator’s role and translation approach. For some authors, community translators working in contexts characterized by power asymmetries need to go beyond accurate and stylistically equivalent reproduction of texts. Lesch (1999: 93), for instance, clearly states the following:

Community translation is a means to an end, namely to equip the community with the necessary information and other means to develop skills for themselves. It is an attempt to balance the power relationship between the sender and the receiver by prioritizing the needs of the community. Effective, empowering communication between the author and the reader via the translated text implies that the translator needs to be on the side of the powerless, that is the reader.

The mere act of translating in the community translation context contributes to redressing asymmetries between those who have access to written information and those who do not. However, this is only the most basic level of balancing power relationships: further levels would require translators to focus on the needs of powerless communities, position themselves on the side of these communities (in the translation process) and aim to empower them through information and skill development.

1.2.2 Translation and language (im)parity

As has been pointed out ...

Table of contents

• Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Community translation: Definitions, characteristics and status quo
• 2 Sociocultural issues in community translation
• 3 Approaches to (community) translation
• 4 Translating official documents
• 5 Translating for temporary communities
• 6 Quality assurance and translation assessment
• 7 Translation revision
• 8 Community translation resources
• Concluding remarks
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright