#TransInTranslation: Theoretical notes on researching translation practices of Polish transgender online communities
In this talk I would like to discuss selected theoretical aspects of my current postdoctoral project Trans in Translation: Multilingual practices and local/global gender and sexuality discourses in Polish transition narratives, carried out at the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University. My point of departure is the trans- prefix, common to many concepts central to this project: transition, transgender, translation, translanguaging, transcultural, transnational or transdisciplinary. These concepts do not only share the prefix, though, but also enter into complex relationships with each other, which I will attempt to map out in my presentation.
I will focus specifically on gender transition and interlingual translation, which could also be seen as a kind of transition (of a text from language A to language B, for example). To do this, I shall explore the notion of language ideologies in parallel with gender ideologies. The idea that languages are unified, countable, stable, orderly and well-bordered resembles the idea that genders are mutually exclusive binary opposites: "monolingualism, like cisgender, often remains a normative, unmarked category of practice and analysis" (Gramling & Dutta 2016: 336). From this point of view, translation and gender transition can be seen as strategies to maintain and uphold the monolingual and cisgender normative ideals (Bassi 2020).
But if we follow queer, postcolonial and ecological approaches, then multilingualism and translanguaging as well as various transgressive gender practices take centre stage. From this perspective, languages and genders are both performative inventions. Viewed from various "uncomfortable" locations at the margins (Milani 2014), the arbitrariness of traditional linguistic and gender categories becomes clear, leading to theories of relationships, connections, embodiments and extensions (e.g. Steffensen 2015). I will attempt to answer the question: can such queer/queered theories reach beyond the mere "pluralization of monolingualisms" (Pennycook 2010: 12), beyond languages and genders as "being there", to be able to describe the actual messy practices and performances of "becoming", moving, touching and transfusing?
Bibliography:
Bassi, Serena. 2020. 'Queer Translanguagers versus Inclusive Language: Translingual Practices and Queer Italian Studies'. In Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi, eds. Transnational Italian Studies. Transnational Modern Languages. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 361–374.
Gramling, David, and Aniruddha Dutta. 2016. 'Introduction'. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 3–4, pp. 333–56.
Milani, Tommaso M. 2014. 'Marginally speaking'. Multilingual Margins 1, no.1, pp. 9–20.
Pennycook, Alastair. 2010. 'Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages'. In Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, eds. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1–41.
Steffensen, Sune V. 2015. 'Distributed language and dialogism: notes on non-locality, sense-making and interactivity'. Language Sciences 50, pp. 105–119.
