Exploring the social complexity of translation with assemblage thinking

Sociological research in translation studies is often divided into three categories: micro-, meso-, and macro-analyses. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates the importance of analyzing the social aspects of translation as part of a multiscaled social reality. This can be done using assemblage thinking as a theoretical underpinning, which rejects binary conceptions of the “social.” The emphasis instead falls on exploring how different levels and scales interact and are entangled in assemblages. Assemblage thinking is a form of social ontology: It presents an approach to conceptualizing more or less permanent structures found in nature and human interactions. It is primarily concerned with the synthesis of emergence, that is, the processes that create the properties of social entities not reducible to their parts. Neither structure nor agent can be assumed to exist, instead, any entity, regardless of scale, must be shown to emerge from the interactions of its components. Research should not focus on one level of social reality, rather it should take the interactions between different levels into account to avoid reductionism and understand translation as the result of complex social production. This chapter shows that translation, from specific translation practices to industry conferences, should be understood as the product of complex processes involving many different actors, including individual persons and large-scale entities. The ontological commitment of assemblage extends agentic capacities beyond the human and sees spaces, events, technologies, and discourses as active in the social production of translation. As a result, various aspects of translation and the identities of translators can be explored as emergent, situated and complex, produced by the interactions of their heterogeneous component parts