Abstract
Translators may make unconscious decisions and their translating process may also be influenced by external factors like discourse that are difficult to gauge. Currently, the focus of discourse-based translation studies is mainly on products like news, machine translations, speeches, etc. There seems a very limited number of works on the process of translating as one of the sub-categories of descriptive translation studies. However, translating is mostly conceptualized as the decision-making that is largely affected by our personal identities shaped and re-shaped in our ‘lifestyle politics’, a notion indicating our politically, ethically, or morally inspired decisions (p. 1).
Acutely discovering the gap mentioned above, Lifestyle Politics in Translation: The Shaping and Re-shaping of Ideological Discourse provides an original approach to investigating how the translating process shapes our identities. The study takes English and French versions of institutional papers by international organs such as UN, EU, the Council of Europe, and alike as cases to explore the ideological effects that translators introduce to the readers, especially the hegemonic lifestyle pervading the West: the individualism, patriarchy, and so-called ‘modern discourses and narratives’ from the euro-centered ideological emancipation since the Enlightenment.
The book first proves the fact that lifestyle is constructed discursively by drawing developmental definitions of lifestyle politics by Bennett (2003), Machin and van Leeuwen (2010), and de Moor and Verhaegen (2020). In a capitalist society, lifestyle ideology is the representation of values, tastes, choices, and habits that are embedded in discourse. Post-translation studies take translations as rewritings which therefore carry translators’ own ideas into the target culture. As a result, translating has evolved into transforming. In this way, translation studies are theoretically linked to ideas like codiscourse, critical discourse analysis, and discursive memory. The authors thus create a working protocol of four meaning-effects of translation: ‘hidden transfer, forced disclosure, visible revelation, and ideological change’ by creatively dovetailing the discourse materiality with inter-discourse practice (p. 21). Six chapters of the book present six case studies that are organized into three distinct but related general topics of hybridization, threats, and well-being. This is done to demonstrate the validity of the established framework and to uncover the true circulation process of western ideas in the translated official documents.
The first topic deals with themes of gender and terms related to AI with the help of terminological sources from Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE), OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, World Health Organization (WHO). It has been found that the forced revelation caused by the linguistic effect of discrepancies between ST and TT and ideological transformation in French versions creates a sort of paradox in resisting hegemonic discourse: the counter-discourse cannot block neoliberal discourse and would put itself to an end by redirecting it from within (p. 89). Nonetheless, French versions showed the values upholding human-centric and gender-equality views in face of both the men/women dichotomy and human/machine hybridization, more likely adopting a liberal and humanistic view on gender and AI.
The second takes terrorism and climate change as points of departure to compare mainly the ideological transformations found in the French versions. Raus investigated the European Parliament’s (EP) Report on the Prevention of Radicalization and Recruitment of European Citizens by Terrorist Organizations after the Paris mass shooting in 2015. The result shows that although terrorism-related documents are associated with the control of people’s agency, French versions on the one hand show resistance to such a trend, and on the other allow its existence by the more frequent hidden transfers from ‘lifestyle’ and ‘way of life’ to just ‘mode de vie’. Besides, through the analysis of the English and French Paris Agreement, UNFCCC, and the European Green Deal, Caimotto claimed that while the French rendering tended to clarify what was unsaid in the original, translators relied on the hegemonic and business-centered way of thinking to reinforce the ‘center’ it originally tries to deconstruct due to the effect of what Lakoff (2010) called ‘tragic hypocognition’.
The Well-being part consists of the final two chapters about mobility and food. In the comparative analysis of the concepts like ‘vulnerability’, ‘stakeholder’, and ‘technological solution’ in both French and English, the author arrived at the conclusion that the fixed relationship between ST and TT is dissolved since the ‘translated’ French carries a rather different attitude (community-based mentality) of French readers toward urban lifestyles (p. 169). The author also targeted some major concepts of our daily diet such as ‘food’, ‘develop’, and ‘income’ from international documents to show that although translations help the spreading of the hegemonic program of meaning that forces people to collectively make the ‘right choice’ on their health, they can still show the force of resistance as translators’ choices are based on the political influence.
The significance of the case studies is twofold. First, they proved the validity of the originally developed framework in previous chapters. Second, they brought concepts that seem far beyond our reach back to those in our daily life to expound on how our already manipulated values function to shape our daily choices. Both are sending a strong signal that concepts and studies of translation should be reconsidered, and our perspective should be changed from a grand narrative to a rather small but realistic point.
The innovative cross-disciplinary theory-building can make us believe that future studies may (1) take translation practice as a process loaded with more information or knowledge than the original; (2) regard the ideology left in translators’ renderings as their fingerprints that can be discovered through the lens of discourse; (3) deepen the understanding of effects of ideologies that go across zones through languages as the apparatus; (4) conduct further interdisciplinary research on how values are communicated and articulated through language transformation (translation). If we follow the line of thought in the book to do further translation studies on documents involving more under-represented languages on IATE, it is believed to shed light on more promising issues facing fields like translation and discourse studies.