Translation Studies Diary, June 13, 2024

I would like to talk about sociological approaches to translation studies because I studied sociology as an undergraduate student.
Some people say that these approaches have not been quite influential.

Bourdieu, a prolific French sociologist, is often cited by a wide range of social science researchers, including those specialising in translation studies.
Translation researchers have applied his influential concepts of habitus, capital and field to translation studies.
However, they mainly studied only within the target culture, which was too narrow to study translation itself.
For example, when researchers write a paper on literary translation from French to Japanese, they tend to look for what is interesting in the Japanese culture.
This may be due to the limitations of sociology has, i.e. that sociological research methods take an enormous amount of time.

I would like to deepen my knowledge from these failures and do research across borders.