Translation and the materialities of communication

This article provides the theoretical coordinates for a set of concerns recently emergent in the humanities that place materiality and its cognates, mediality and technicity, at the centre of intellectual enquiry. The fields of media theory and media philosophy on the one hand, and book history and textual bibliography on the other, despite tenuous links between their intellectual traditions, have each in their own way highlighted the importance that objects, things, media and machines play in the very stakes of civilization. This article works through the implications of this thinking for translation and the study of translation

An archaeology of affect: Reading, history and gender

Literary history is filled with stories of reading as a deeply affective experience. Why does our own age deem such reactions trivial? And why is affective reading almost exclusively now associated with women readers

Translation and Optical Media: Spirit-Channeling in Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Drawing on Victorian visual studies, this essay addresses the ways in which Edward FitzGerald co-opted optical media into his translational practice and theory for his numerous renditions of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The aim is to show that his stance on translation—like that of his contemporary Dante Gabriel Rossetti—while imbued with older cultural beliefs and practices, such as the transmigration of spirits and souls, is also strikingly contemporary when it comes to one of the key media technologies of his age: the magic lantern. The focus on the little noticed connections between translation and optical media is intended as a step towards a more comprehensive media history of translation that pays attention to translation not only in the familiar contexts of oral and written cultures but also in visual and screen cultures

Translation's Histories and Digital Futures

Drawing on Latour’s actor-network-theory and De Landa’s robot historian, this essay asks in what ways translation’s past is a prehistory of the present and to what extent nonhuman agents have shaped and are shaping translation. In particular, it examines the impact of computational media on translation and finds that the difference made by the computer as a convergence medium is that, for the first time in history, one medium has become capable of presenting in its entirety the media history of translation. To grasp the changes that translation is undergoing in the 21st century therefore requires a comparative understanding of its relations to the mediascapes of the past, present, and future

Web-network Social Capital: Exploring Network Actions and Benefits for Online News Community Members

This research introduces a new measure of social capital for users of online news communities by applying social capital concepts used to measure networks in real-world communities. “Web-network” social capital measures the strength of ties created online for the benefit of engagement that is non-local. Using the concept of the “networked individual” as a theoretical tool, this research sampled users of news sites that offered online community forums for comment. The results show that traditional social capital measures rooted in local community increase both local forms of engagement and engagement in causes that are more national than local