ABSTRACT
Like in the previous chapter, nonhuman translation actors are first distinguished from numerous nonhuman elements, which are followed by a discussion on how three groups of nonhuman actors exert agencies during the translation production. The war, often being regarded as fixed and ‘still’ historical background, paradoxically helped to strengthen and extend translation networking by inflicting upon it. Whereas texts in translation have been confined to source text and target text, an actor-network perspective can easily reveal a network of start, in-between, and end texts of translation, which worked either as input or output of translation and functioned differently in different stages of production. Letters have been used as a source of data in previous studies; however in this research they, in addition, served as credible media through which translation actors converged and associated across space and time, contributing actively to translation production. The list of translation actors expands, with nonhuman elements added to human participants. Translation is therefore an outcome of various human and nonhuman actors working together. Its meaning extends from a process of producing translation text to a social and translational venue where various social and translational human and nonhuman actors and connections are made. The configuration of the network moreover began to emerge as the interactions of human and nonhuman actors increasingly unfolded, showing not a straightforward and clean network, but one with detours and dead ends.
