Cover not available
Discussion published In:
Target
Vol. 20:2 (2008) ► pp.333–347
Discussion

Resistance and non-resistance to boundary crossing in translation research

| The University of Manchester, UK
Ideas, concepts, theories and methods spread within and across disciplines, communities, countries and traditions. Richard Dawkins (1976: 214) has suggested that memes (units of cultural transmission) are in competition for survival, and that in some situations of stability it is difficult for a new meme to invade. My interest is in concepts, theories and methods in academia, and the fact that these memes have more or less difficulty in spreading. They encounter more or less resistance in jumping boundaries, whether those boundaries are disciplinary or boundaries constituted by national research traditions. The aim of my paper is to discuss the spread of ideas, and situations of resistance and non-resistance to the spread of ideas, taking as examples three cases of boundary-crossing research projects in Translation Research. I shall suggest through those examples how resistance may be overcome.
Keywords: memetics, disciplinary boundaries, interdisciplinarity, rhetoric, translation studies, literary studies, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • The spread of ideas
  • Case study No. 1
  • Case study No. 2
  • Case study No. 3
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 November 2008
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.20.2.08bro
References (24)
References
Becher, Tony. 1989. Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual inquiry and the culture of disci¬plines. Milton Keynes/Bristol: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open Univer¬sity Press.Google Scholar
Blackmore, Susan. 1999. The meme machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brownlie, Siobhan. 2006. “Investigating the relationship between To live the orange and Vivre l’Orange ”. Women in French studies 141. 61–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. “De l’emploi récurrent de « cause » dans la première traduction de Nana: Quel commentaire ?” Palimpsestes 201. 97–119.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2007 unpublished conference paper) “Translation and the fantastic: Nancy Huston’s Instruments des ténèbres ”. Paper given at the Contemporary French Women’s Writ¬ing conference, London, September 2007.
Ceccarelli, Leah. 2001. Shaping science with rhetoric. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cixous, Hélène. 1989 [1979]. Vivre l’Orange / To live the orange. Hélène Cixous. L’Heure de Cla¬rice Lispector. Paris: Des Femmes.Google Scholar
Connor, Ulla. 1996. Contrastive rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cam-bridge-New York-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dennett, Daniel. 1995. Darwin’s dangerous idea. London etc.: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Fuller, Steve. 2003. “Interdisciplinarity: The loss of heroic vision in the marketplace of ideas”. [URL] [accessed 20/02/2007]
Huston, Nancy. 1996. Instruments des ténèbres. Arles: Actes Sud.Google Scholar
Hyland, Ken. 2000. Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Harlow etc.: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, theory and practice. Detroit, MI.: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Leuven-Zwart, Kitty van. 1989. “Translation and other: Similarities and dissimilarities I”. Target 1:2. 151–181.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Philip. 1985. “The measure of translation effects”. Joseph F. Graham, ed. Difference in translation. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 1985. 31–62.Google Scholar
Lynch, Aaron. 1996. Thought contagion: How belief spreads through society. The new science of memes. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rose, Nick. 1998. “Controversies in meme theory”. Journal of memetics—Evolutionary models of information transmission 21. [URL] [accessed 20/02/2007]
Ross, Jonathan. (2007 unpublished conference paper) “Translatological turns?: The spread of ideas beyond Translation Studies”. Paper given at 5th EST Congress, Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 2007.
Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1988. Translation Studies: An integrated approach. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford-Cambridge MA: Black-well.Google Scholar
. 2003. “Why rethink interdisciplinarity?” [URL] [accessed 20/02/2007]
Zola, Emile. 2002 [1880]. Nana. Edited by Henri Mitterand. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Gambier, Yves & Luc van Doorslaer
2016. Disciplinary tialogues with translation studies. In Border Crossings [Benjamins Translation Library, 126], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Hubscher-Davidson, Séverine
2014. Emotional Intelligence and Translation Studies: A New Bridge. Meta 58:2 ► pp. 324 ff. DOI logo
Pohlan, Irina
2014. The journalOsteuropaas a forum for Russian–German academic dialogue. Russian Journal of Communication 6:1 ► pp. 32 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2024. Creativity and Additive Manufacturing. In Knowledge Production Modes between Science and Applications 2, ► pp. 161 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.