Bourdieu’s “rules of the Game”: an Introspection into Methodological Questions Bourdieu’s “rules of the Game”: an Introspection into Methodological Questions of Translation Sociology

During the last ten years or so, the discipline of Translation Studies has undoubtedly become an established and recognized branch within the scientific community. This is also proven by the discussion of “turns”, or “paradigmatic shifts”, which recently have been increasingly the topic of various publications. Among these shifts, or turns, we can also find the increasing concern in questions regarding “the social” in translation, which discuss not only the networks of agents and agencies and the interplay of their power relations, but also the social discursive practices which mould the translation process and which decisively effect the strategies of a text to be translated. Against this background, this paper seeks to discuss Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic forms in its application to the translation issue. It will particularly introspect Bourdieu’s key terms field, capital and habitus and their function in the reconstruction of a “translation field”. In the last few years, many works have drawn on Bourdieu’s analytical tools in order to better understand the socially relevant functioning of translation processes in their wider perspective, including the operational functions of the social setting in which a translation is shaped. On the basis of these works, this paper sketches the outlines of a “Translation Sociology”.