ABSTRACT
Actor-network theory (ANT) was first developed in the 1980s at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation in France to respond to the need for a new social theory that could engage with science and technology studies. From the 1990s onward, ANT became increasingly popular and was applied – not without misunderstandings and “much abuse” – to fields beyond science and technology studies, including organizational analysis, computer science, health studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, environmental studies and economics, among other fields. While scholars of translation and interpreting have acknowledged the potential of ANT, they have also expressed a certain discomfort with some of its assumptions, particularly with regards to the claim that there is no more to social life than networks. In terms of methodological tenets, ANT can be credited with encouraging ethnographic field studies, which have proliferated in translation studies since the introduction of the theory in 2005.
