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Military History and Translation Studies: Shifting Territories, Uneasy Borders

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Abstract

Both Translation Studies and Military History are disciplines which occupy radically shifting territories, and it has been at their currently uneasy borders that this conversation on transdisciplinarity has been conducted. The move from culturally as well as socially visible translational contexts to non-hegemonic social actors and ordinary lives provides us with a space in which the traditional monolingual assumptions of Military History can be challenged, and in which the military terrain as a space of encounter can be reimagined as a linguistically embodied landscape. Combining the historian’s concern to take account of the particularities of any situation with the translation scholar’s desire to address the multilingualism of war potentially moves these disciplines beyond their traditional frontiers, forcing both of them to grapple with the messiness and disruptions which characterise any war and conflict ‘on the ground’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.reading.ac.uk/languages-at-war

  2. 2.

    http://translationinww2infin.wordpress.com/

  3. 3.

    http://www.line.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/mod_ca_img2.jpg, accessed 4 July 2012.

  4. 4.

    Arab Cultural Awareness 58 Factsheets, TRADOC DCSINT Handbook no.2, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence US Army Training and Doctrine Command, Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, January 2006.

  5. 5.

    On the importance of lists, catalogues and corpora in translation history, see Pym 1998: 38–54.

  6. 6.

    Kotijoukkojen Esikunta, Sotavankitoimisto Kirjeistö, National Archives, Helsinki.

  7. 7.

    Some of the above reflections are taken from H. Footitt (2012).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Theoretische und Angewandte Translationswissenschaft, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Pekka Kujamäki

  2. University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Hilary Footitt

Authors
  1. Pekka Kujamäki
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  2. Hilary Footitt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hilary Footitt .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Michael Kelly

  2. University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Hilary Footitt

  3. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Myriam Salama-Carr

Additional information

The editors are grateful to John Benjamins for permission to reproduce this discussion from: Yves Gambier & Luc van Doorslaer, Border Crossings. Translation Studies and other disciplines, 2016, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, vol. 126, 49–71: https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/btl.126.

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Kujamäki, P., Footitt, H. (2019). Military History and Translation Studies: Shifting Territories, Uneasy Borders. In: Kelly, M., Footitt, H., Salama-Carr, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04825-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04825-9_6

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