ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses primarily on social and communication theory to elaborate a definition of narrative that is particularly suited to investigating the way in which translators and interpreters function in situations of conflict. It presents an overview of the status and effects of narrativity, including its relationship to genres, science, categories, fact and fiction. The chapter discusses the political import of narratives and the way in which narrative both reproduces existing power structures. Narrative, including scientific narrative, categorizes the world into types of character, types of event, bounded communities. It also systematizes experience by ordering events in relation to each other – temporally, spatially, and socially. One of the effects of narrativity is that it normalizes the accounts it projects over a period of time, so that they come to be perceived as self-evident, benign, uncontestable and non-controversial. The awareness that every acceptance of a narrative involves a rejection of others makes the issue politically and personally vital.
