ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with activist approaches to translation. It discusses the common assumption that committed linguistic interventions are a useful tool for socio-political transformation, and in this regard highlights the importance for much language-based activism of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which suggests that linguistic structures are a determinant of people’s worldview. The chapter gives an overview of highly visible spheres of activism in Translation Studies (TS), touching upon gender, the postcolonial condition, new media technologies, and volunteer interpreting, and accentuates translation activism as a phenomenon both textual and embodied. Noting the limited attention paid to the working conditions of translators in the literature on activism in translation, it is argued that more energy could be directed toward considerations of the position of language labor as a field of economic rather than cultural struggle. Questions of collective identity and the changing nature of translation practice accompany, in this regard, issues of resistance to professional expectations.
