Exploring and expanding the plus of translators’ power : translatorial agency and the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO)

Recent research from Organization Studies highlights the frequently unnoticed power of translators as they shape organizational and corporate identities and develop their own roles. Their function in conveying meaning across linguacultural barriers gives them a profoundly agentic role in the strategic and operational communication that takes place within multilingual organizations, but also in the way an organization presents, brands and markets itself to target groups and markets in other linguistic cultures. Research at the interface between international corporate communications and translation demonstrates a distinct demand potential for the added-value intercultural and transcreative skills that professional human translators have. The communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) provides a viable framework for exploring the agency of translators, but until now, CCO-oriented studies have focused on paraprofessionals working in organizational fields other than translation and rarely mention professional translators or, when they do, depict them as invisible conduits involved in a hermetic process of neutral, wholly faithful translation akin to transcoding. This article considers how a CCO framework for investigating translatorial agency can and should be extended to professional translation, thereby providing a key to empowering professional translators in the organizations using their services. It proposes linguistic ethnographic and (network) action research methods to investigate factors that inhibit and promote translators’ agency in delivering effective multilingual organizational and corporate communications for international companies and institutions