Articles

A Reflection on Nationality and Translation Part 2

By: Ilhaan Mohamed

Since my last PTC blog update I have been conducting interviews to understand how translation professionals understand the relationship between nations and the practice of translation. During this stage of my research I came across the following questions:

Does the idea of the nation state interfere with any decisions that translators make?

Can nations and translation be separated?

Do colonialism and international relations play a part in the translation industry?

Do national narratives exclude some ethnic minorities and how does this affect translation organisations?

Can national borders affect how literature is translated/presented?

It turns out that the wording of these questions was quite difficult to figure out as they needed to express an academic understanding of nation states while still being easy to understand from a non-academic perspective. I am grateful for the participation of those that I interviewed as the topic required a lot of careful thought and reflection. I’m sure that the PTC share my interest in what their audiences think of these questions and any other ideas that we haven’t thought of.