Mona Baker interview

Interview with Mona Baker, Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at the

University of Manchester. Recorded by Tomás Costal (UNED). Subtitles
available in English.

Good morning. -Good morning.

We're here today with Mona Baker, Professor Emerita of Translation
Studies at the University of Manchester.
Thank you for having us. –
Thank you for the interview.

Professor Baker, Translation Studies, how did it emerge?

And how has it evolved in the last decade?
It's a difficult question because it goes back several decades now and like
every story you say as you probably know, I'm very much into Narrative
Theory where you decide the starting point is, is a matter of how you see
things not an empiric reality, as it were. So, for me, of course as far as I'm
concerned, there's been work on translation scholarly work on
translation, going on for a very long time but Translation Studies as a
discipline that is recognised in the Humanities and in the academy in
general really probably dates back only again, depends on what you mean
by recognized and the extent to which it was recognised.

Say, for instance, here in the UK I would say that kind of... we're talking
about the very very late 80s, early 90s when people started to talk about
something called Translation Studies with a great deal of suspicion at the
beginning because translation was largely, and until relatively recently
seen as a vocational activity, not an area of research. An academic
discipline, by default, involves research.44And I would say it was in the
early 90s when people started talking about it, lobbying for it to be
recognised as an academic discipline and that's, in terms of the UK, more
or less right. It may have been different in other countries. When I started
doing work on translation and when I even started writing In Other Words
or about doing something that might lead one day to writing something
like In Other Words there was no such thing as a discipline. And, in fact, I
had great difficulty finding a master's degree to do on translation and
prepare me to think about it in a scholarly way. And so I ended up having
to do an MA in Special Applications of Linguistics with translation forming
a very very small part of it. And that was the best I could do in the late
80s. And then the situation changed gradually. A lot of people were
involved in developing the discipline in different ways and directions and
it's evolving even today because people have different ideas about what
Translation Studies is and what it covers and where the boundaries are.
In that respect, of course you could say it's not different, since boundaries
are always fluid and a matter of contestation: does it count as Translation
Studies?
In the many years I... took on the role of editor of a major international
journal. The Translator that question kept coming again and again when
you have papers submitted for publication in a journal such as The
Translator you'll find that lots of referees, members of the boards will all
disagree, sometimes, about whether this really is a paper for a journal on
Translation Studies or beyond the boundaries of Translation Studies.
What I find interesting in the past few years and I welcome that
development is that the boundary is expanding now and things that
maybe 10, 20 years ago people would have thought of as absolutely
beyond Translation Studies not our business, somebody else's Politics or
Social Sciences or whatever and are now taken very seriously, as part of
the discipline. So that's encouraging.

Is that other disciplines have become much more interested in

translation?

In fact, some other disciplines are talking about the "translation turn" in
their disciplines and they're engaging with, as all disciplines have to
they're engaging with actual translation work professional translators
and interpreters and not just them but activist translators and
interpreters people who engage in translation and interpreting not in
order to make a living but because they're committed to a cause and this
is a way of promoting it. There's also been a lot more interest in and
awareness of the complexity of the ethical side of translation and
interpreting in the real world and a lot of the codes of practice and
codes of ethics that are adopted by the major institutions that represent
translators and interpreters and which were adopted in abstract and had
little to do with what actually happens on the ground in diverse
situations all these codes are being contested and have to be brought
down to reality.