Translation and globalization

Abstract

The dominant paradigm for describing the contemporary world is that of globalization. No account of changes in the world from the 1970s onwards can fail to account for a whole series of globalizing processes. One of those globalizing processes is translation and globalization is quite literally unthinkable without the operation of translation and translators.Before describing the nature of the globalizing processes, it is necessary to define what we understand by globalization. Anthony Giddens, a leading theorist of globalization, has characterized globalization as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (1990: 64). If we look more closely at this definition, it is clear that globalization has been a feature of human history for a very long time and is not confined to developments in the second half of the twentieth century. The Greek, Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, British, French and Islamic empires at different historical moments through trade, military conquest or religious conversion linked distant localities in ways that had a profound effect on local cultures. Part of that effect were the translation consequences of this imperial contact which has been an object of study for translation scholars (Robinson 1997; see also Merrill, this volume). There are, however, three salient aspects of the contemporary globalization period that makes it markedly different from earlier forms of imperial or commercial proto-globalization. The first aspect is perceptual. One of the most widely disseminated images of theApollo space missions was that of the Earth itself, a fragile blue planet presented against a background of infinite, abyssal darkness. The image suggested in a striking manner a notion of a planetary or global identity that would be hugely significant in mobilizing ecological awareness around the vulnerability and interdependence of the inhabitants on the planet. The world was now perceived as one global entity rather than as a series of discrete, local units. The second aspect is institutional. The late modern period has been characterized byan exponential growth in international organizations such as the United Nations (UN),the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Alongside the emergence of international organizations has been the move towards forms of supra-national governance of which the most notable example is the European Union (EU). Parallel to these institutional developments has been the creation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace andMedecins sans Frontieres with a significant global presence. As both the origins and consequences of problems – pandemics, environmental catastrophes, poverty, genocides, financial governance – are seen to be crossborder and global, localized, national responses are no longer felt to be effective and coordinated efforts at a transnational level are deemed necessary. The third distinctive aspect of globalization is economic, the emergence in the latemodern period of the network-based or reticular economy. The activities of the reticular economy are underpinned by the existence of informatics and telecommunications networks which allow a business to operate at a global level in real time. In essence, this means that production and distribution activities can be coordinated across the globe through the near-instantaneous connectivity that is offered by information technology. Such connectivity facilitates the emergence and operations of giant transnational corporations (TNCs). Underlying the formation of the reticular economy is a basic shift in business model from the Fordist mass production of the immediate postwar period (1945-73) and the shift to the post-Fordist model of lean production from the 1970s onwards. Whereas the Fordist model primarily depended for its efficacy and profitability on the economies of scale of the mass production of standardized goods, the post-Fordist model concentrated on niche, small-batch production of differentiated goods with the emphasis on getting the product as quickly as possible from producer to consumer (‘time to market’). In the postFordist world, advertising and product branding take on particular importance as a premium is set on responding to increasingly volatile consumer preferences, preferences that are in turn stimulated by further marketing as maintaining consumption is crucial to the success of the model. A notable consequence of the conjunction of the reticular economy and the post-Fordist business model is the decentralization of production. The dominant paradigm for much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was the ‘workshop of the world’ concept, with raw materials sourced in colonies and finished goods produced in the imperial centres for export to the rest of the world. The closing decades of the twentieth century saw a move away from this paradigm and a shift towards delocalization of production in low-cost centres across the globe. Taken together, these three aspects – perceptual, institutional and economic – of contemporary globalizationmeans that the geographical extent and speed of impact of globalizing forces are now greater than at any other time in human history.