Translatorial Linguistic Ethnography in Organizations

Abstract

Many if not most contemporary workplaces are multilingual and in numerous ways connected and networked across borders. The linguistic set-ups and communication needs take different shapes, but entirely monolingual work is a rarity in today's connected and globalized societies. Executives are recruited internationally or seconded to expatriate positions, and even if staying home they interact with their global peers and operate between company headquarters and local organizations. These higher echelons of work often operate with a controlled language regime and a combination of local languages and an international prestige language, in today's world often English. In comparison, the most multilingual workplaces may well be found in shop floors and low skills workplaces of Western countries, where people with immigrant background find employment. In these work communities the company language and the national language may be accompanied by a multitude of languages and locally relevant lingua francas.All these multilingual workplaces are also spaces of translation, with their explicit or implicit language and translation policies (Meylaerts 2011) and their organically grown and habitualized translation cultures (Prunč 2008, p. 24-25). Michael Cronin (2006 conceptualizes multilingual, multi-ethnic space as first and foremost a translation space, i.e. a space where translation needs to happen for mutual comprehensibility and where multilingual repertoires meet and mix. Translation, then, needs to be understood in a wide sense of transcultural and interlingual movement of verbalizations (Prunč 2008, p. 19).Translation that takes place in organizational translation spaces is not only the kind executed by professional translators, for complete and final documents, labelled as translations and ordered from the in-house translation department or translation agencies. Translation is much more widespread in the everyday functioning of the organization, and much more fluid and porous. Recurrent orality, as opposed to written translation, adds to its ephemerality. This TRANSLATORIAL LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY IN ORGANIZATIONSclimate of constant movement between different languages can be called tanslatoriality, and once we start looking we realize that translatoriality is embedded in societal life in most corners of the contemporary, networked world.These spaces can therefore also be conceptualized as translatorial spaces, a concept derived from Holz-Mänttäri's concept of translatorial action and signalling a space of translation activity emphasizing actors (Koskinen, 2017). Since the publication of Justa Holz-Mänttäri's now classic treatise in 1984, translatorial action has, in Translation Studies vocabulary, been used to denote translators' activity that transgresses the boundaries of equivalence-based search for optimal correspondence between two texts. That is, the translation may radically deviate from word-to-word correspondence, and it may also be based on more than one source text. Holz-Mänttäri's research ethos was to emp...

Reversal of language hierarchy and the politics of translation in a multinational corporation

“…Are shifts in meaning intentional or unintentional? Researchers could also follow the full journey of a translated text within an MNC and document the translators’ fingerprints as it undergoes translation (Koskinen, 2020). To conclude, we believe that translating meaning across borders is the very essence of IB as a field.…”

Metaphorical and Interlingual Translation in Moving Organizational Practices Across Languages

“…Both metaphorical and interlingual translation is undertaken by paraprofessional translators – managers, employees and consultants working for the organization – who are more visible on the organizational scene than professional translators although their translation work tends to remain hidden from the purview of top management. Future research could draw on translation studies and conceptualize multilingual workplaces as ‘translatorial spaces’ (Koskinen, 2020, p. 2), which include both metaphorical and interlingual translation as agentic acts.…”