Journal of Communication and Culture
Theme: Translation, Cosmopolitanism & Resistance
Coordination: Maria Alexandra Lopes
Deadline for submission of original articles: 30th November 2014
Throughout history, translation has always been a site of multiple, often conflicting political, social and aesthetic agendas. Translation has diversely proven a pathway to conquering and steamrolling others into conformity, a locus of resistance and preservation of difference, as well as a space of dialogue between disparate worldviews. In either of these guises, translation has always had a powerful impact on different areas of human experience, from religion to science, from the media to politics, the economy and literature (Woodsworth and Delisle: 1995, 2012).
As an act of negotiation, translation is inextricably linked to processes of exchange of goods and ideas, cosmopolitization, hybridization and mobility (Cronin, 2002, 2010). Resistance, on the other hand, depicts a large array of attitudes, mentalscapes, emotions, political gestures that react against any given circumstance. ‘Resistance’ is taken here as a broad concept encompassing different meanings: on the one hand, the at times strong and/or violent opposition to something extant (the status quo, bigotry, censorship, ideology, globalization, etc.) or to come (new ideas, technology, value systems, etc.); and on the other hand, the ability to remain immune to something (other people, revolutionary trends, innovation, new ways of thinking, etc.). Thus, resistance may imply movement or immobility, creativity or epigone-like repetition, conservatism or unconventionalism with the decision to translate is often governed by one impulse or the other, depending on the degree of interest in change/preservation a given community evinces (Venuti, 2013).
The present issue of Comunicação & Cultura wishes to address and highlight modes of resistance and cosmopolitanism that translation may have promoted or facilitated down the ages and, especially, in the present time, thus reflecting upon the role and the effects of translation in different media, in the shaping of present-day politics and global economy, in acquainting a given culture with different patterns of behaviour, ways of life, narratives and geographies. As a potent tool for spreading ideas and ideologies, translation helps shape worldviews and social attitudes in indelible ways that need further investigation.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 