This commentary is written by Dr M. Rosario Martín Ruano, Co-PI (together with Prof. África Vidal) of the research project VIOSIMTRAD [Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Society, FFI2015-66516-P] (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and ERDF Funds).

The research project VIOSIMTRAD is carried out by researchers of the Research Group TRADIC (Translation, Ideology, Culture) at the University of Salamanca, Spain along with collaborators affiliated with other institutions. The project goes beyond the assumption that language functions as a powerful tool used in the construction of reality and identities, asserting that it also reflects — and very often perpetuates — power relations between diverse social groups and varied identities which, though unequal and inequitable, are generally perceived as natural.

Research by project members has drawn on Pierre Bourdieu’s ([1972] 1977; [1998] 2001) notion of “symbolic violence,” which suggests that by way of repetition, discourse practices often contribute to dehumanising, stereotyping and rendering invisible certain communities in subtle and concealed ways, even with the complicity of those groups subordinated by said dominant discourses, who often accept these as natural and inadvertently perpetuate them. This notion helps to illuminate to what extent translation also participates in frequently ideologised processes of (re)construction and negotiation of identities in the current, asymmetrical globalisation model of our era. After all, although it generally goes unnoticed, translation is a fundamental component of globalisation in general and, more precisely, of the processes involved in the dissemination of discourses by powerful socialising and regulatory agents who currently play a major role in the discursive construction of identities and the social orders in which these coexist, such as institutions and the mass media.

Research by the group has explored the subtle mechanisms through which translation often aligns itself with patterns of institutionalised subordination that result in symbolic violence and its minoritisation of certain identities in fields as varied as audiovisual translation and translation for the media; advertising; photography and visual arts; history and historiography; literature; performing arts and music, etc. View a list of recent publications by members of the group. This research project has paid particular attention to the legal and institutional sphere, as dominant translation practices in these fields have been perceived as potentially contributing, albeit perhaps involuntarily, to the engendering and perpetuation of unequal relations of hegemony and subordination between dominant cultures and powers and minoritised languages and identities.

In this regard, some of the factors that have been identified as potentially creating and/or aggravating “symbolic violence” in the legal and institutional realm include the following: global language dynamics which aggravate asymmetries in the uneven translation flows between “translated” and “translating” languages; ingrained centripetal language ideologies and ethnocentric translation practices which have an impact on the (re)construction of (often transnational) phenomena and subjectivities of our present, frequently resulting in the taming and neutralisation of hybridity and heterogeneity; the long-standing preference in the legal and institutional realm for literal and lineal models of equivalence, which are becoming even more prominent in recent years due to increasingly automated translation processes and which idealise and promote uniformity and standardisation to the detriment of heteroglossia and diversity; and the prevailing professional narratives and expectations which mould legal and institutional translators into conduits, thus obscuring important and ever-present implications related to ideology, identity, and power issues, and ultimately constraining their room for manoeuvre in favour of cross-cultural understanding (Vidal 2013; Martín Ruano 2014, 2018). Taking as the point of departure the assumption that power and power differentials are enacted, maintained and perpetuated through discourse (Vidal 2018), even well-intentioned translation practices that comply with prevailing quality standards and with normal and/or normative procedures emerge as practices which potentially fuel symbolic violence and domination.