BENJAMINS

Translation
T R A N S L AT I O N

and Affect
Kaisa Koskinen

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Translation and Affect
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Volume 152
Translation and Affect. Essays on sticky affects and translational affective labour
by Kaisa Koskinen
Translation and Affect
Essays on sticky affects and translational
affective labour

Kaisa Koskinen
University of Tampere

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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 Table of contents

Acknowledgements vii

Preface: Living with translation ix

chapter 1
Affecting and being affected: On the names and nature of affects 1
1.1 From neural to social: The spectrum of affect 3
1.2 Affects in translation studies 7
1.3 Now, what is affect (and does it matter)? 10
1.4 What can we do with affect? 24

chapter 2
Affective labour and sticky affects 29
2.1 Affective labour 29
2.2 Love as a sticky affect in translation 34
2.3 Affects and network economy 38

chapter 3
Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 45
3.1 Appraising affects 46
3.1.1 Affective valence and appraisal 48
3.1.2 Appraisal theory in text analysis 49
3.2 Modulating affects 54
3.3 Reception, affinity and affect 62

chapter 4
The misery and splendour of translating 71
4.1 Translator Saarikoski and his diaries 73
4.2 Impostor syndrome as a translatological malaise 78
4.3 Work engagement and the desire to translate 86
4.4 The pains and pleasures of translation 91

chapter 5
Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 95
5.1 The sticky fear of betrayal 95
5.2 Doing being an interpreter 97
 Translation and Affect

5.2.1 Performance as doing being 97

5.2.2 Performing impartiality 100
5.2.3 Accuracy and affect 106
5.2.4 Prohibition of empathy 107
5.3 Embodied affinities and distances 110
5.4 Affective labour, codification and reflexivity 113

chapter 6
Translation and the sense of space 117
6.1 On spaces and places 119
6.2 Spaces and places of translation 121
6.2.1 Sense of space in translation work 121
6.2.2 The spaces of translation in poetry performances 130
6.2.3 The space of translation as a playground 134

chapter 7
Translation technology and affect 143
7.1 Translators’ technology-related affects 144
7.2 Machine translation and affects 149
7.3 Future scenarios 151

chapter 8
Affect and pedagogy : Reflexivity, empathy and empowerment 157
8.1 Reflexivity as a foundational skill 160
8.2 Empathy and affect 166
8.3 Empowerment 173

chapter 9
Conclusions: Affecting and being affected 179

References 183

Index 199
 Acknowledgements

This volume pushed itself onto my desk and laptop at a time when I really did not
have any resources for a project that required extensive amounts of free time and
energy to devote to thinking, reading and writing. Perhaps because of this, it has
become very dear to me, and I have developed a very affective relationship to it.
The manuscript was written over several years and in the interstices of academic
life. Its completion has therefore relied upon invitations that allowed me to get
away from my office and everyday responsibilities and provided me with opportu-
nities to give talks related to the topic and get feedback from different audiences. I
wish to express my gratitude for these invitations to Hannu Kemppanen (Univer-
sity of Eastern Finland), Yvonne Lindqvist (Stockholm University), Ji-Hae Kang
(KATS), Smiljana Narančić Kovač (University of Zagreb) and Estefanía Muñoz
Gómez (University College Cork).
The progress of this manuscript has also depended on writing retreats: a thou-
sand thanks for the hospitality and support of my dear friends and colleagues Nike
Pokorn, Kristiina Abdallah, Tuija Kinnunen and Outi Paloposki who at different
stages of the project opened their doors and let me stay in their summer home or
apartment to fully focus on my writing. This concrete form of support and encour-
agement means a lot to me. For some of the retreats I also received financial sup-
port: many thanks to my former employer University of Tampere and its Faculty
of Communication Sciences.
I am grateful to John Benjamins Publishing Company for the opportunity
to be part of its prestigious translation library, and to Yves Gambier for his early
encouragement and to Roberto Valdeón and Isja Conen for their trust in the value
of my project and their patience with my scheduling. I am particularly indebted
to the two anonymous reviewers who not only devoted their time and expertise to
pushing my thinking and writing forward but also generously shared their varied
affective responses to the reading experience, allowing me to anticipate the kinds
of reactions the book may generate. All remaining failures and gaps are entirely
my own responsibility.
This book builds on my earlier research. Some of this research is explicitly
co-authored, all of it is a result of collaboration. I wish to thank my co-authors and
colleagues in translation studies and beyond collectively for an academic ecosys-
tem that has always been constructive and inspiring. During the writing process
I have received a lot of encouragement and support. I am particularly grateful
 Translation and Affect

for the enthusiasm from the field. The comments and feedback from professional
translators and interpreters on many aspects of the affective in their work have
given me faith in the relevance of this book project in times of self-doubt and
impostor feelings. Many thanks to Pia von Essen and Tiina Kinnunen in particular
for their insights and encouragement. Colleagues have read and commented draft
sections of the manuscript and helped me clarify my thinking: many thanks to Tytti
Suojanen, Mary Nurminen, Anne Ketola and Kristiina Abdallah. Sari Hokkanen’s
revision of the final manuscript was invaluable, and her incisive editorial reading
improved my argumentation. Ninni Vaaranka assisted with the bibliography.
For me, this monograph is no ordinary academic book. It represents a bal-
ance sheet of my academic career, a summary of what I have accomplished and
how I see my contribution to the study of translational phenomena. For long I
understood it as an effort at consilience within my own oeuvre; it was only during
the revision process that I realized consilience is a more extensive aim as well. I
aim to bring together a number of areas and approaches in the study of translation
and interpreting through the concept of affect. Given that consilience is a concept
I have borrowed from the thinking of Andrew Chesterman, it seems appropri-
ate to use this opportunity to gratefully acknowledge Andrew’s extensive mentor-
ing and influence in my academic career, from the 1990s onward. I also want to
­acknowledge the role of Douglas Robinson’s pioneering thinking on the affective
in translation in my thinking, from the lecture on the somatics of translation in
1988 – my first contact with translation theory – to his more recent publications.
They still give me the same mixed sense of excitement and bafflement I felt as a
first-year student in 1988, an academic affect I love and hate.
One person requires a very special acknowledgement, both for her contribu-
tion to this book project and to my academic life in general. Outi Paloposki gener-
ously read all chapters as I was progressing, some of them repeatedly. Without her
positive feedback and constant encouragement, I would not have had the stamina
to push this through. The same may well be true of my career. I cherish the aca-
demic sisterhood we have had over the decades, and I dedicate this book to Outi.
Affectionately.
 Preface
Living with translation

It is certain, however, that to gain an exact idea of a science one must practice it,
and, so to speak, live with it. That is because it does not entirely consist of some
propositions that have been definitely proved. Along side of this actual, realized
science, there is another, concrete and living, which is in part ignorant of itself,
and yet speaks itself; besides acquired results, there are hopes, habits, instincts,
needs, presentiments so obscure that they cannot be expressed in words, yet so
powerful that they sometimes dominate the whole life of the scholar.
 Émile Durkheim 1893/1933. The Division of Labour in Society.
 Clencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

The above quotation of Durkheim came my way quite accidentally, in an article by

Anne Warfield Rawls (2003: 220) where she offers a critical analysis of the limited
success of sociology in fully acknowledging the legacy of Erving Goffman and
Harold Garfinkel. In the article, she sees the (then) contemporary sociology far
too focused on institutional and systemic thinking; on rules, norms and beliefs,
and too eager to reach generalizations to appreciate the messy details of lived situ-
ations. For her, the focus in the quotation cited above is on propositions and prac-
tices; for me, it is on “hopes, habits, instincts, needs, presentiments”. Goffman,
Garfinkel and other sociologists taking a microanalytical view of social life were
acutely aware of the embodied and emotional aspects of situatedness, and their
analyses of everyday encounters placed the lived interaction of communication
partners under close scrutiny.
According to Rawls, sociology had not, at least not by the year 2003 when the
article was published, been able to overcome the false dichotomy of micro- and
macroanalysis and to fully appreciate the revolutionary power of Goffman’s and
Garfinkel’s approaches. I am not in a position to judge the validity of Rawls’ 2003
argument, or to assess its relevance for today’s sociology with its affect turns and
practice turns. Instead, what caught my attention in the quotation, and in Rawls’
discussion of sociology, were the similarities with a field closer to my heart. Trans-
lation studies, as we know the discipline today, has grown its roots in numerous
directions. Some of its origins can be traced back to the (applied) linguistics of the
1950s, to the machine translation initiatives and research of the same era, and to
its strong ties to the creation of multilingual international and intergovernmental
organizations (the UN, the EU) and the building of training facilities for
 Translation and Affect

translators and interpreters for these organizations as well as for the local needs of
globalizing nations. This disciplinary history has contributed to giving the study
of translation a modernist, functional and pragmatic outlook.
Histories of translation studies tend to emphasize the role of applied linguis-
tics, to give translation studies a longer historical pedigree, but the independent
field of translation studies was largely brought into being through the systemic and
norm-focused paradigm of descriptive translation studies (DTS) from the 1980s
onward, with a strong input from scholars with backgrounds in literary theory and
comparative literature. Although the rise of the discipline in the 1990s coincided
with a postmodernist, poststructuralist and postcolonial phase that eschewed
technocratic approaches and favoured emancipatory stances and politically and
ethically attuned researcher-positions, the descriptive approach, with its systems-
theoretical basis and a tendency to seek generalizations and provable propositions,
proved more influential and has had a more sustained effect on the field. This
influence was further institutionalized by the foundation of the journal Target
(in 1989) and in the long-standing series of CETRA summer schools (from 1988
onwards), which served as tools for disseminating the research agenda and for
training new generations of TS scholars in the paradigm.
The legacy of DTS was, and still is, of crucial value in terms of providing a
sustainable scholarly base for the budding discipline, but it also directed research
in ways that overshadowed other potentially relevant viewpoints that have been
coming to the fore only recently. Indeed, in addition to understanding the struc-
tures of translation (fields, production networks, institutional hierarchies, etc.)
and to seeking laws of translation, be they universal or probabilistic, we also need
to “live with” translation, attuned to its “concrete and living” nature, and the often
obscure “hopes, habits, instincts, needs, presentiments” of the people involved,
translation and interpreting scholars included. In short, to fully understand trans-
lation, one also needs to understand its affective side, the ways in which it forms
a part of the lives of those involved with it. This book seeks to explore the many
faces of this involvement.
There is also another underlying reason for opening this monograph with a
quotation from Durkheim, one of the founding figures of the discipline of sociol-
ogy in the late 19th century. Affect was one of the key areas of study in early soci-
ology, in such disciplinary milestones as Durkheim’s own work on anomie, Georg
Simmel’s analysis of living in the city, and C. Wright Mills’ studies of the work-
place. While this book does not follow a strict theoretical model, and the view-
points and supporting arguments presented in it derive from many disciplines, I
see it primarily as a contribution to the subfield that we have since the early 2000s
began to label as the sociology of translation. In tracing emotions and affects, my
  Preface .


focus is on social and interactional aspects more than on neuropsychological, cog-

nitive or individual ones. Parallels to sociology are therefore a good place to start.
The affective side of translatoriality is a multifaceted issue with permanent rel-
evance and fascination, but it is also a pressing topic. The technological advances
of automated translation have changed the translatorial landscapes dramatically,
and machines are taking on routine translation tasks. What remains for the human
to deal with, at least for now, is the affective and the ethical decision-making in
multilingual communication. We do not yet have a full picture of what that entails.
Although a number of scholars have discussed the notions of affect and emotion
in translation studies, there is no comprehensive account of translation and affect
available as of yet, and this book thus proposes to chart the terrain. In this book I
aim to provide a holistic overview of the various ways in which affect can be use-
fully studied in translation studies. Each semi-autonomous chapter targets an area
of interest and opens into different theoretical and methodological directions. At
the same time, they each develop the core argument of the book: affect is ubiqui-
tous in life and in translation, some affects are particularly sticky and influential,
and translators and interpreters are affecting and being affected in their work in
myriad ways. Most chapters also report on empirical findings with the aim of indi-
cating different opportunities for further study.
This book has been a long time in the making, and it builds on my sustained
interest in the role of affect in various translation-related issues. In many ways, I
am returning to most of my earlier research interests, now looking at issues such
as translators’ agency, workplace culture, institutional translation practices and
retranslation specifically and explicitly from the point of view of affect. Indeed, a
reader familiar with my previous work will find recognizable elements from my pre-
viously published texts. Here, they reappear in rewritings and new combinations.
Some chapters also report on entirely new research as well as findings and results
previously published only in Finnish; the section on translator training builds on
my own experiences. None of the chapters is a reprinted or translated version of
previously published articles. Rather, in this book I develop my earlier ideas further
and bring them into new constellations through a sustained focus on the affective.
It has been argued that academic texts on the topic of affect tend to be rather
devoid of emotion (Probyn 2010: 74). Indeed, that may be the case here as well,
but I have aimed for writing differently. But writing affectively and academically is
not that easy, and the resulting style not necessarily successful. Regardless of the
outcome, this writing process has definitely not been without its affective ups and
downs, quite the contrary. It was therefore opportune that when I was deep in the
writing-cum-thinking process for this book, already having hopelessly missed my
first deadline, I had an appointment with a psychologist to discuss the problems
 Translation and Affect

I had with sleeping. To find the root cause for this bodily reaction to a number
of simultaneous challenges in my life at the time, she asked me to keep a diary of
how I feel at any given moment of my everyday life and where in my body these
emotions are making themselves sensorily felt. I did not reveal the book project
to her, but I was grateful for the reminder to be reflective of my own affects and
embodiments at a time when I was emphatically focusing my cognitive efforts to
understand and explain those of others. These reflections allowed me to be more
attuned to the various affects involved in the project: It has made me feel insecure
and frustrated, and struggling for clarity and understanding, making my chest
feel heavy. I have been giddy with the lightness of writing when things have gone
smoothly. I have also felt anxiety in my stomach at the thought of ending up only
reporting what everyone else already knew, revealing my imposture. And I have
been heart-warmingly grateful to those numerous colleagues who have supported
me during this process, and thankful for those many insightful writers whose texts
have allowed me to see things more clearly, and even more so for those who have
muddled my over-simplified preconceptions. Writing is a corporeal activity and it
affects bodies, as Elspeth Probyn (2010: 76) reminds us. The writing of this book
has affected and keeps affecting me. The book that you are now reading is, in its
incompleteness, very dear to me. In the pages that follow I have tried to capture, in
an accessible form and in pragmatic terms, many of the most important takeaways
of my research career so far, seen through the lens of affect. I can only hope it will
also succeed in affecting your body, one way or another.
The two central premises of the book I can trace back to my PhD project
(Koskinen 2000), and even beyond, to the very beginning of my academic endeav-
ours. The first premise is a mind-set: that of avoiding binary, dualistic set-ups and
embracing the more complex logic of both/and. Regarding the notion of affect,
discussed in the next chapter, I deliberately refuse definitions that would force
a choice between body and mind; I work to accommodate both intrinsic and
extrinsic elements of emotions, taking both individual and the social aspects into
account; I try to cater for both translating and interpreting, avoiding a common
strategy of dealing only with one or the other. The second premise is best explained
as a research question, and it is the one I keep trying to answer in all of my research
activities: what kind of an activity is translating, and what is the task of the transla-
tor? Affect, as a flexible and open-ended concept, allows me once more to reflect
on the endlessly fascinating practice of translation from a new angle.
 chapter 1

Affecting and being affected

On the names and nature of affects

It is not a new revelation that emotions and affects are relevant to our being in the
world. It is our human condition. It also has a long history in scientific thought.
Aristotle already pointed out that our affective sensitivities are necessary for an
appropriate perception of significant events and features in our environment. In
Rhetoric, Aristotle (n.d.) argues that emotion is “that which leads one’s condition
to become so transformed that his judgment is affected, and which is accompa-
nied by pleasure and pain.” Indeed, as Aristotle’s understanding of the interplay
of personal sensitivity and the surrounding context makes clear, affect has a dual
character as both an internal, bodily phenomenon (of pleasure or pain) and an
interpersonal force with the capacity to affect our condition and judgement. This
wide scope makes affect a fascinating object of study, but it – and the multitude of
different approaches to handling it – has also led to much confusion.
The first confusion is conceptual and terminological: different scholars and
different approaches and disciplines prioritize “feeling”, “emotion” or “affect”, or
some other related concept such as “mood” or “atmosphere”, and it is seldom clear
whether the same term denotes the same concept in different usages, or whether
a different term also implies a different conceptualization. I will discuss this ter-
minological jungle at length in Section 1.3. For now, suffice it to say that of these
terms, I have chosen to foreground “affect”. I have two main reasons: First, among
competing terminologies affect is regularly used in connection with the turn in the
social sciences and cultural studies that my theoretical framework is indebted to
(the affect turn). Second, I have begun to favour unordinary words for theoretical
concepts in my research as they allow us to overcome familiar meanings and inter-
pretations and conceptualize familiar terrain in novel ways. In particular, in recent
years I have swayed from studying “translation” towards having “translatoriality”
and “translatorial action” as my object of study. This shift allows me to stretch the
boundaries of our object of study beyond currently prototypical understandings
of the phenomenon. In a similar manner, “affect” allows me to incorporate bio-
logical sensations, cognitively felt emotions and social constructions of acceptable
 Translation and Affect

e­ motional responses within one framework and under one bridge concept, with-
out getting lost in the maze of different categorizations.
Having said that, I need to acknowledge that this decision creates a bit of ten-
sion between my vocabulary and that of two main sources of my ideas, Sara Ahmed
and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Sara Ahmed, whose idea of the stickiness of affects
runs through this text, has explicitly stated her reluctance to use the word affect,
explaining that she picked up emotion as her word partly because she wanted “to
use the word that is used in everyday life; that my mother would use when she was
describing her feelings or her situation. She would think of it in terms of emo-
tion while the word affect didn’t have that kind of everyday resonance” (Ahmed
in Schmitz & Ahmed 2014: 108). Ahmed chooses “emotion” because it resonated
with everyday parlance; I opted for “affect” to avoid too close connection to it. But
she, too, emphasizes that the phenomenon we are trying to capture encompasses
more than what everyday usage readily allows for: “We assume to know what it
means – emotion is about having a feeling in response to something – however, it
is much more complicated and socially mediated than that” (ibid.: 97). Her basic
argument is that emotions are a social practice. Similarly, it has become custom-
ary to say that translation is a social practice. And as a social practice, I argue, it is
also an affective practice (Wetherell 2012). This bundle of practices is at the heart
of this book, as are the sticky affects often combined with translationality in the
recurrent narratives of love, trust and fidelity, for example.
Sara Ahmed (2004) also talks about affective economies, in the sense of cer-
tain bodies or objects and the emotions around them being able to create affective
value. This aligns with Arlie Hochschild’s well-known concept of emotional labour,
which highlights the economic aspects of affective labour (1983; see ­Chapter 2).
Hochschild’s approach builds on the idea of complex social negotiations over
expected and acceptable affective performances for different professionals, and the
labour of constructing adequate emotional set-ups at work. Again, in this book
my chosen terminology favours affective labour over emotional labour. Since the
first publication of Hochschild’s book, a number of competing approaches to affec-
tive labour have emerged (see esp. Hardt 1999). Some current usage differenti-
ates between the two, defining emotional labour as internal management of one’s
own emotions, and affective labour as producing or modifying emotions in others.
However, these two often blend together, and both elements are indeed present in
translators’ and interpreters’ work. For my current purposes it seems more useful
to cast my net widely and allow different viewpoints to enrich my discussion than
to follow an orthodox theoretical path and rigid categorizations.
In a recent paper, Andrew Chesterman (2019) maps the four core foci of trans-
lation studies – linguistic, cultural, cognitive and sociological research – looking
for opportunities to reduce disciplinary fragmentation and increase consilience,
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

for example, through the use of bridge concepts. Affect, I propose in this book,
can function as one such bridge concept, crossing over the various orientations in
translation studies and also cutting through different contexts and modes of trans-
latorial action. Hence, the chapters in this book travel across linguistic-textual
analysis, the mind of the translator, socio-technical and cultural environments and
spaces of translation, and oral, written and multimodal modes of communication.
I readily acknowledge that for a single-authored monograph this kind of spread
creates vulnerabilities: I am not an expert in all the fields I discuss, and there are
gaps in my knowledge. What I hope to achieve is not a full coverage of the affec-
tive in translation in any of the areas discussed but a compelling argument for a
continued exploration of what we can do with affect in translation studies. Readers
more familiar with any particular area will have ample opportunities for criticism.
This I have to accept: any project aiming for consilience across the spectrum of
approaches in translation studies will have to begin by accepting that everyone’s
viewpoint is partial and that everyone is grounded in particular epistemologies,
methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Hence also the space given to the per-
sonal both in style and in content throughout this book.

1.1 From neural to social: The spectrum of affect

Affect is an eternal human question, but it is also a trendy topic. In many ways
we are living in an age that foregrounds the affective. Understanding the emo-
tions and affects of oneself and others is an asset and a commodity. It has always
been beneficial to be socially skilful, and it certainly is now in the current cultural
climate. Social media is feeding on our affective reactions, from thumbs up and
showers of hearts to trolling, orchestrated outrages and click-bite journalism. Poli-
tics, always the art of persuasion, is getting more and more openly emotion-based,
often to the detriment of factual content. In our personal life, we focus on creating
in our body and our mind the states we desire, or the looks that others desire. It is
only logical that researchers, too, are paying increasing attention to the many roles
of affect in our lives.
Heightened interest in affects and emotions is also related to technological
advances, in particular, to artificial intelligence and deep-learning machines. The
more invasive the role of AI in our lives, the more we need to understand both what
makes human action different from machines, and how machines can become
more sophisticated in imitating humans. The answer to both lies in understanding
affect, both intrapersonally and interpersonally. One of the fields that have a long
history with increasingly pervasive technology is translatorial activities. The ques-
tion of affect is therefore pressing in translation studies. It has to become a central
 Translation and Affect

element of translator training, to equip human translators with skills that allow
them to operate in areas where translation technology as it is today is unable to
perform and to thrive in a constantly shifting professional terrain. We also need to
better understand the role of affective reasoning in translatorial decision-making
in order to train the machine to translate better. And we also need to understand
the sticky affects evoked by translation technology in translators and others, and
to chart the dramatic societal changes in how translatoriality is being experienced
in its current technologized form.
This attention to affects, emotions and experiences also signals, in particu-
lar in the natural sciences, a return of suppressed topics of research. As opposed
to earlier work in many fields, mainstream 20th-century science shunned emo-
tions as too subjective, too irrational, too vague and too unscientific for empirical
study (Damasio 2000: 12; Sanfey 2007). In contrast, neuroscience now steers away
from previous rationalist stances and posits that affect is closely intertwined with
cognition, that there is no emotion without cognition, and no cognition without
emotion (Lane et al. 2000: 6). Emotion, when understood as an evaluation of the
extent to which we are content with a particular situation or interaction with our
environment, is seen to be inseparably intertwined with cognitive appraisal:

[F]ew if any perceptions of any object or event, actually present or recalled from
memory, are ever neutral in emotional terms. Through either innate design or by
learning, we react to most, perhaps all, objects with emotions, however weak, and
subsequent feelings, however feeble. (Damasio 2004: 93)

In contrast to the excessive emotionality of our times, I am fond of the focus on

also the weak and feeble affective responses in Damasio’s quotation above. Valence,
that is, a positive or negative evaluation, may vary in its intensity, but the human
approach to objects and events seems to be constructed through some kind of
affective appraisal. This neuroscientist view also resonates with Silvain ­Tomkins’
classic psychological affect theory where he describes affects as amplifiers (1995:
20): positive or negative affective engagement makes us feel more intensely.
The notion of affective valence as a gradient value, and of affective response as
an amplifier allows us to appreciate the fundamental role of affect in decision-
making. It is therefore not surprising that fields dealing with decision-making,
such as economics and game theory, have begun to incorporate affective elements
into their modelling of human behaviour. The image of a rationally calculative,
cost-conscious and self-serving homo economicus prevalent in classical and neo-
classical economics has been accompanied by homo sentiens (or, ‘emotional man’)
as an alternative vision of human cooperation and decision-making. Emotional
man, a term originally proposed by Helena Flam (1989), aims to model decision-
making in a way that also takes into account our emotional ties to others and the
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

role of different sentiments such as love, loyalty or resentment. Similarly, game

theory is looking into the ways in which affective factors play an important role,
particularly in bargaining and competitive games where decision-making is social
by nature (Sanfey 2007). Brain-imaging studies of interaction have discovered, for
example, that reciprocal cooperation rewards participants with more intense posi-
tive feelings than do financial gains (ibid.: 600). In the opposite case, players may
find punishing the unfair and nonreciprocal partners quite satisfactory even when
this leads to a financial loss on their own part (ibid.).
Brain imaging and other empirical methods for measuring bodily sensations
have directed research focus to the visceral, biological side of affect, and the new
findings in the natural sciences have also been incorporated in cultural theories
of affect. Damasio and Tomkins, in particular, are both household names also in
socio-cultural affect theories. Their views will be discussed further in Section 1.3.
One of the benefits of the concept of affect is that while “emotion” tends to be
understood primarily as an identified, cognitively processed inner state, “affect”
is less rigidly defined. It therefore allows for an understanding that covers the full
spectrum from neural functions to social interaction, from body to mind and
beyond. We humans are social animals, and affect, even though grounded in the
neurobiology of our bodies, is both a response to outside impulses and a force
that aims to mobilize others in interaction. In interaction, we screen for clues of
the other’s affect and interpret the situation through our own affective responses,
and we modulate our affective stances to match and balance them to the other’s
stances, searching for the right tone for the situation.
In the social sciences, an interest in affect re-emerged during the 1990s and
has become more pronounced during the 21st century. Logically, in these studies,
the social elements of affect are foregrounded. Patricia Clough (2007), for example,
sees affect both as an incorporeal, bodily potential that extends our consciousness
and as an interpersonal force. She compares affect to electricity, flowing among
and between people, making us do things and instigating changes in the environ-
ment. Brian Massumi’s view of affect is similar to Clough’s in focalizing affect as
an event of felt transitions, but he also further emphasizes its political – or proto-
political – dimension. Affect is “politically oriented from the get go”, he argues
(2015: viii). This is also Sara Ahmed’s basic argument in her book The Cultural
Politics of Emotions: she underlines that emotions are not psychological states but
social and cultural practices (2014: 9) and they therefore “involve a stance on the
world, or a way of apprehending the world” (ibid.: 7). Affects may be (also) private
and personal, but as decades of feminist thought has taught us, the personal is
political. It is through personal emotional investment, that is, affective economy,
that particular objects become saturated with affect, sticky (ibid.: 11). This sticki-
ness of affect increases in social circulation and over time, creating attachments
 Translation and Affect

between bodies and accumulating affective value. Sticky affects give rise to famil-
iar affective narratives, and these familiar narratives, Ahmed reminds us, deserve
close and careful reading (ibid: 1).
Anyone trying to work with the concept of affect will encounter this abun-
dance of meanings and categorizations. Sensations, feelings, emotions and affects
are understood in different ways for different analytical and methodological pur-
poses. I am in Sara Ahmed’s (2014: 6) camp in thinking that the distinctions can
only be analytic conceptual reifications of an interplay of the internal and external,
the unconscious and conscious, the biological and cultural. The body, the mind,
and the interpersonal and socio-cultural environment form a complex field of
affective forces. Categorizations can help us disentangle some elements in this
field, but they are always reductions. One way of working around the polarity of
biology and interaction is to focus on the role of affect in bridging bodily, cogni-
tive and social phenomena. Because of the double bind of the internal and the
contextual, affect is essential for making sense and appraising our environment.
According to Margaret Wetherell, affect is in fact synonymous with “embodied
meaning-making” (2012: 4). Affect gives us bodily signals on how to interpret
the situations we find ourselves in, and it can therefore be defined as an interface
between the self and the surrounding context, as “the participants’ emotional and
bodily-experienced response to and interpretation of their lived experience, as a
hinge between the self and the world” (Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016: 83). Ahmed,
however, reminds us that the binary logic of the person and the context is not
tenable. The movement is not only outside-in, nor inside-out. It is more constitu-
tive: through how we affectively respond to objects and others we create the very
boundaries of in and out, and “emotions are crucial to the very constitution of the
psychic and the social as objects” (Ahmed 2014: 10). Hinge is indeed perhaps not
the best metaphor to capture the role of affect in interacting with the world (in
the article we ended up using it for want of a better one). But both the idea of an
interface between the affected individual and the object of affective interpretation
or an affectively laden context, and the idea of an amplifier reinforcing what we
encounter and making it more felt, signal an understanding that affect can also be
used as a tool that helps us experience and understand our life-world. It is there-
fore also a relevant perspective to job satisfaction and motivation, and it contains
pedagogical repercussions. These will be discussed in later chapters.
The understanding of affect as an interface between the self and the environ-
ment emphasizes the dynamic interplay of more or less conscious psychobiological
inner processes and our surroundings and social interaction. This double entendre
combines the subjective and the social and forms the backbone of this book, but it
leans decisively towards the social. While each chapter bring to the fore a different
aspect of affect, the overall emphasis is on its complex social and ­interpersonal
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

nature. It follows that in the following pages social and cultural theories of affect
will be emphasized. Although references to neurocognitive and psychological
research will be relied on in order to not lose sight of the bodily side of affects,
what I am aiming for is comprehensive sociocultural theorization of the roles of
affect in translatorial activities.

1.2 Affects in translation studies

Translation studies in the 21st century has foregrounded human actors. The label
of the sociology of translation and its early slogan of translation as a social prac-
tice, first promoted by Michaela Wolf (2002), captured the zeitgeist of the transla-
tion studies community, and the past two decades have witnessed a flood of new
research on different social contexts of translation work, on translators’ habitus,
on collaborative practices and on user responses to translation. Earlier descriptive
translation-studies approaches had already paved the way for this “humanizing”
of translation studies (Pym 2009) by way of bringing to the fore the strategic deci-
sion-making inherent in translation and providing a wealth of textual evidence of
ideological, political, cultural and societal manipulation in different case studies.
Obviously, any manipulative decision-making will also have an affective layer:
issues such as self-censorship of taboo elements will entail a negotiation of the
affective elements in the source text, the translators’ and other agents’ personal
and professional stances towards them, the values, rules, norms and expectations
of the receiving context and the affects involved in the reception of the target text.
All languages have developed a plethora of resources for managing, modulating
and manipulating affects, and in translation these resources are matched against
one another (in the languages involved) and against the contexts of the texts in
question. The matching, managing, modulating and manipulation, however,
require human assessment and decision-making. The humanizing of translation
studies therefore logically presumes also taking a closer look at the many roles of
affect in translation.
In cultural studies, the study of affects and emotions has gained momentum
so forcefully that some scholars already talk about an affect turn (Clough & Halley
2007). While I do not wish to claim to start yet another turn in translation studies,
I argue that there is indeed merit in taking stock of the recent findings across the
social sciences and to reassess the relevance of affective factors for translation stud-
ies. It is not a new revelation as such. Some pioneering scholars have long recog-
nized the role of affect in translation and interpreting studies. Douglas Robinson’s
somatic translation theory from 1991 is an early example of an affective approach
in theoretically oriented translation studies, and he has since published extensively
 Translation and Affect

on the topic. Somatics is explicitly physiological. Robinson (1991: x) describes it

as “the ways in which our body ‘signals’ to us what we know and how we should
act on it,” so that we “know in our gut” what we have to do and say. The “knowing
in the gut” is a liberating message to translators, whose gut reactions and playing
by the ear are given theoretical validation. This physiological layer can be studied
empirically with tools such as the EEG, tomography and pupillometrics, bringing
questions of affect in contact with recent process studies (see O’Brien 2011: 5–6).
Indeed, the role of affect has long been recognized in process studies, at least
by some scholars and at least tangentially (cf. Muñoz Martín 2016: 12). A number
of early studies aimed to uncover translators’ personality traits and characteris-
tics such as their confidence levels (Laukkanen 1996), their degree of personal
engagement (Jääskeläinen 1999) and risk-taking patterns (Künzli 2004). This line
of research has been gaining increased attention, and a number of recent articles
have focused on the explanatory power of different affective elements in under-
standing translator performance (e.g., Hubscher-Davidson 2013a on emotional
intelligence and Hubscher-Davidson 2013b on intuition; Lehr 2014 and Rojo &
Ramos 2016 on the effect of positive and negative feelings, and Apfelthaler 2014
on empathy; see also Hubscher-Davidson 2018: 31–34). A more pronounced
approach to affect has been evolving in recent years, side by side with the process
of writing this book, under the label of cognitive translatology, inspired by an
approach to translatorial cognition called the 4E & A – that is, embodied, embed-
ded, extended, enactive and affective (Muñoz Martín 2016). For the time being,
my reading of the evolving cognitive translatology group is that the embodied
and embedded aspects have been emphasized: the recent emphasis on ergonom-
ics (e.g., Ehrensberger-Dow & O’Brien 2015) focuses on bodily and environmen-
tal challenges in translation work, and Hanna Risku’s longstanding agenda has
systematically built an embedded or situated understanding of translation (e.g.,
Risku 2002; Risku et al. 2016). In contrast, the focus on affect is budding but
not yet flourishing (see also Lacruz & Jääskeläinen 2018: 7). Although the cul-
tural studies ethos that runs through this book is epistemologically quite different
from the empirical tradition of cognitive translation studies, I hope researchers in
this group will find some inspiration into giving the A of 4E & A a more promi-
nent role in the future.
Descriptive translation studies has always given a central role to translation
norms. As a social system of control, norms have a strong affective element embed-
ded in them. The affective and the normative engage in a complex interplay, where
emotions produce particular behaviour and that behaviour in turn produces emo-
tions. Both norm compliance and norm breaches induce affective appraisals from
all parties involved. Some norms also explicitly address emotions, as sociocultural
“feeling rules” (Hochschild 1979: 563) either predispose us to feel in particular
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

ways (or to express particular feelings, fake or real) or prohibit particular emo-
tions (forcing us to hide them if necessary). This set of socially shared but rarely
formally codified rules “delineates a zone within which one has permission to be
free of worry, guilt, or shame with regard to the situated feeling” (ibid: 565). Like
any social norms, feeling rules can be obeyed or broken, the latter at varying costs.
The term affect itself (or emotion) is not found in the index to the revised edition
of Gideon Toury’s classic treatise, but the key term of acceptability can be seen to
contain an affective undertone. Acceptancy is defined as adherence to the norms
prevailing in the target culture (Toury 2012: 79), that is, an acceptable translation
evokes neutral or positive affects and familiarity in the target readers, and allows
the translator to be free of anxiety or shame.
Later research stemming from a DTS tradition and building on the sociol-
ogy of translation framework mentioned above has concentrated on issues such as
translators’ social role, status and habitus. Again, the explicit focus is rarely on the
affective or the emotional. However, issues of social standing and perceived status
with respect to other colleagues (e.g., Dam & Zethsen 2009), job satisfaction (Dam
& Zethsen 2016), corporate culture and identifications (Koskinen 2008) and other
similar endeavours position translators within a social environment, also measur-
ing their affective atmosphere. One element of translation work that has gener-
ated heated discussions is translation technology. It will be discussed at length
in Chapter 7, so I will not go into details here, but it is surely worth noting that
translatorial work has already become cybernetic in ways many other professions
are only beginning to experience. This development has to be taken into account
in any attempt that tries to capture experiences and affects of translating and inter-
preting. In translation, interactive and cybernetic machines have indeed become
“a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which
to redefine our bodies and minds themselves” (Hardt 1999: 95).
As the above discussion aims to show, the notion of affect has never been
fully absent from the study of translation and interpreting. Still, it has rarely been
the direct object of scholarly analysis. The issue has gained momentum as a num-
ber of neighbouring fields have brought forth new theoretical and empirical find-
ings, and as translation studies has increasingly turned its attention to the various
human issues involved. So far, the most extended effort to this endeavour has been
dedicated by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson. In her monograph Translation and
emotion (2018), she tackles the issue of translator personality and emotions in
detail. She applies psychological research on emotions to the study of translation
and translators in order to “shed light on particular aspects, or stages, of transla-
tors’ emotion processing” (ibid.: 13). The book takes three different viewpoints to
emotions: perception, regulation and expression. Its most extended discussion,
however, deals with more permanent personality traits, in particular emotional
 Translation and Affect

intelligence. The core thesis is that certain personality traits, such as emotional
intelligence, are helpful for successful translating, while some others are detri-
mental to it (ibid.: 15). This is an interesting, and also plausible, claim, but since
translating is a wide area of activity, and each individual is a complex bundle of
traits, dispositions and moods, causal links from personality traits to desired per-
formance are not likely to be straightforward. Even so, some of the early results in
this line of inquiry have indeed been interesting. For example, the study by Caro-
line Lehr (2014) indicated that translators’ commitment correlates with increased
creativity whereas negative feelings such as anxiety correlates with accuracy. Simi-
lar research on suitable personality traits has a longer history in interpreting stud-
ies, starting as early as 1974 (see Hubscher-Davidson 2018: 29 for an overview of
studies on interpreter personality).
In translation studies research, affect has more often been present implicitly
than explicitly. Most existing research focused on affect has been conducted within
cognitive translation studies. Its historical development, building on psychological
perspectives, leaning towards the natural sciences in its epistemology and method-
ology, and traditionally focussing on the mind (rather than the body or the socio-
cultural context), has led to a psychologically oriented view of affects. Current
research therefore emphasizes the view of affect or emotion as something residing
inside a person rather than moving in the world, and is prone to use empirical
testing and statistical reasoning in its argumentation. This is all well and good, but
not the whole story. This book aims to complement these on-going ­projects with a
view that emphasizes theorizing from social and cultural theories, uses qualitative
methods and aims at capturing the socio-cultural workings of affect.

1.3 Now, what is affect (and does it matter)?

Affect has been theorized in many ways, in different disciplines. So have emo-
tions. This has resulted in a multitude of competing approaches and terminolo-
gies. Working my way through the deep and muddy waters of varied terminology
and contested definitions has tested my abilities of thinking in ways no other
theoretical challenge has before (and this confession comes from a person whose
academic career started with trying to conceptualize deconstruction). In the
above sections, I have tried to give you a reasonably workable summary of the
theoretical background of this book. This section gives the interested reader an
opportunity to follow my path through the marshland to an understanding of
affect. Still, I do not claim to have produced a comprehensive overview; the lit-
erature is so overwhelming that the task has been deemed impossible by many
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

(e.g., Anderson B. 2014: 4), but I have tried to provide some signposting. If you
are not fond of complex conceptual analyses, you can skip this and move directly
to Section 1.4.
In this book, I take a holistic approach, dedicating each chapter to a differ-
ent aspect of affect, without pledging full allegiance to any particular school of
thought or aiming to steer the course of the discipline of translation studies in any
one direction. What remains constant is a sociological perspective: how affects
affect translation, how translation as a social practice is affectively scripted, how
translations are borne out of an affective engagement in translating and also pro-
duce affects in reception, and how also these are often normatively and affectively
scripted. My aim is complementary to Hubscher-Davidson’s, in the book men-
tioned in the above section. Our choices of key words (emotion for Hubscher-
Davidson; affect for me) can be read as a signal of a difference in emphasis. As
will soon become clear, neither of the two terms has been given a conclusive defi-
nition in scientific literature, and they are often used interchangeably. However,
since vocabularies also signal particular schools of thought, our preferences can
be taken to symbolize affinity with some approaches and a distancing from some
others. More specifically put, Hubscher-Davidson’s approach is theoretically and
methodologically aligned with psychology and focuses on the psyche of the trans-
lator. The prototypical scenario in her approach is that of a professional translator
encountering an emotionally challenging source text (e.g. 2018: 120) In contrast,
this book leans towards cultural studies and the social sciences and aims to capture
the social environment and interaction with the other actors involved as well as
the subjectivity of the translating or interpreting person. I also try to steer away
from extreme, turbulent and sensational affectivity, and focus on “ordinary affects”
(Stewart 2007), to also shed light on the everyday, routine and habitual aspects of
translation and affect. As Margaret Wetherell (2012: 13) underlines, affect is not
only chaotic but also practical and organized; it is “about sense as well as sensibil-
ity”. It would therefore be misleading to only focus on “affect’s dramatic and turbu-
lent qualities” (ibid.). Similarly, Ben Anderson (2014: 14 and passim.) emphasizes
that affect is not only about irrational excess, and that the “unruly dynamics of
living” are also organized through conditioning structures of feeling, and that both
power and engagement with the world work through affect, making it a transfor-
mative societal force.
As said above, I see our approaches as complementary, not as competitive.
They aim to tackle the complex interplay of affects and emotions in translation
from different directions and with different sets of methodological and theoretical
tools, but the quest, I feel, is the same: to advance our understanding of the human
condition in the context of translating and interpreting. While I obviously cannot
 Translation and Affect

vouch for Hubscher-Davidson’s choice of words,1 in my case, the final selection of

terminology was also, and to a significant degree, affectively based. A gut reaction.
In the end, a gut reaction it also had to be. Anyone interested in how our affec-
tive involvement with each other, our environment and events around us has been
philosophized, theorized and empirically researched, soon realizes that they have
entered a terrain that is dishearteningly difficult to navigate. As will have become
evident by now, different authors and different research traditions have emphasized
different aspects of affect or emotion. These different viewpoints and understand-
ings stem from varied ontological and theoretical suppositions. These supposi-
tions can be mutually contradictory, but they are also often internally convoluted.
It has been commented that all fields struggle to define emotion as a distinctive
­phenomenon, and many scholars have come to argue that the term is not a unitary
concept defining a single object of study at all (Franks 2007: 41). In their introduc-
tion to The Affect Theory Reader, a key publication in theoretical discussions on
affect in social and cultural studies, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth list
eight main orientations of theorizing affect, starting from different sets of concerns
and aims, and with varying initial premises (Seigworth & Gregg 2010: 6–8). And, I
might add, with varying terminological preferences. In the conceptual jungle sur-
rounding affects and emotions, the same term can be used to mean different things,
and confusing synonyms abound. In a handbook article in Keywords for American
Cultural Studies, the difficulties connected with affect are summarized as follows:
‘Affect’ names a conceptual problem as much as a tangible thing. As such, it is best
understood as an umbrella term that includes related, and more familiar, words
such as ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’, as well as efforts to make distinctions among them.
(Cvetkovich 2007: 13)

It is as an umbrella term, or a bridge concept, that affect is used in this book, to

sidestep the conceptual problems one encounters in reading previous work on
affect and emotions. One often finds people quoting Spinoza on saying that “affect
is a confused idea”, because that is how it easily feels. In the general definitions
section of Part III of Ethics (1665/2004: 83), Spinoza indeed uses that phrase to
explain what affect is:
An affect that is called a passion of the mind is a confused idea through which a
mind affirms of its body (or of some part of it) a greater or lesser force of existing
than it had before – an idea which, when it is given, makes the mind think of one
thing rather than another.

. For Hubscher-Davidson’s discussion of the vocabulary and her terminological and typo-
graphical choices (affect is always italized), and on her decision to treat emotion, affect and
feeling as synonyms, see 2018: 10–13; for a differentiating definition of affect, emotion, and, by
extension, feeling, see ibid.: 108.
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

Spinoza is well-liked and often quoted in contemporary discussions because

according to him, affects, passions of the mind, are states of dialogue between the
mind and the body, and this antidualism fits in with much contemporary thinking
in cultural studies. Affects also work in interpersonal ways, so that the positive or
negative affects of others – or, to be more precise, our imagining of the affects of
others – will have an influence on our affects, either towards pleasure or unplea-
sure. The various potential set-ups and outcomes are enumerated by Spinoza (ibid.,
Part III). Significantly, Spinoza’s idea of affect revolves around change: there is a
change in the body, and a change in thinking in the mind. The change in thinking,
Spinoza clarifies, is desire. So, affect is a body–mind complex that directs a person
towards a desired state of affairs through a process of change. Affect, in Spinoza’s
often quoted phrase, is all about “affecting and being affected”. It is significant that
the connector is ‘and’ and not ‘or’: that the one affecting is also affected, that there
is a transition in both (Massumi 2015).
Affect, understood in Spinoza’s terms, is about being in the world. Hence the
focus on places and spaces and their affective affordances in Chapter 6. The body
– our sensory, somatic and visceral existence – is crucially important in ground-
ing us in place. A phenomenological understanding sees the body as the “point
from which our social world unfolds … our point of view in the world” (Thomas
& Correia 2016: 6–7). Building on Spinoza’s work, political scientist and philoso-
pher Brian Massumi defines affect as a transversal concept: it involves body and
mind simultaneously in “thinking-feeling”, it transcends any objective/subjective
dichotomy and it is fundamentally relational in nature.
Massumi’s research position is radically open-ended. Philosophers may find
it relevant to create complex and open-ended conceptual models about matters of
body, mind and soul; in the hard sciences such as psychology and neuroscience,
the idea of complexifying rather than aiming to reduce is alien. Instead, affect
theorists in these fields aim to provide operationalizable categorizations that allow
for modelling and empirical testing. In these models, the bodily and the cognitive
tend to be kept apart, creating a terminological and methodological need for ten-
able distinctions. In the resulting reductive models, the focus of interest has been
in the bodily states linked to affective appraisals.
In practice, various approaches travel across disciplinary boundaries, creat-
ing crossovers that are sometimes rather unorthodox. For example, in cultural
theory, Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) work is very much aligned with Massumi’s,2 but it

. Seminal essays by Sedgwick and Massumi in 1995 allow these two scholars to be posited
as the pioneers of the current interest in the affective in cultural studies by Seigworth and
Gregg (2010: 5). For a critical review of Massumi’s and Sedgwick’s approaches, see Wetherell
(2012: 10–11; 19–21).
 Translation and Affect

also builds on the complex psychological affect theory developed by Silvain Tom-
kins. Tomkins represents a traditional psycho-biological view that assumes that
all humans share a universal set of basic emotions. His well-known typology con-
sists of nine primary affects, with a high or low degree of intensity: enjoyment-joy,
interest-excitement, fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, shame-humiliation,
disgust, dissmell (avoidance/contempt), and surprise-startle. These affects form an
innate signalling system that helps us navigate in our lives, deciding what we want
to reinforce and what we want to avoid (Tomkins institute n.d.). In this frame-
work, affect is understood as the biological response to external stimuli; awareness
of affect, in turn, is named as feeling; whereas feeling combined with the memory
of our previous experiences of similar feelings is called emotion (ibid.; Nathanson
1994: 49).3
From our own life experiences, we can easily recognize that affective states
often include a bodily element. We have had butterflies in our stomach in antic-
ipation of an exciting and challenging event; we may have trembled with fear, or
our heart has bounced with joy. We are also more or less capable of consciously
recognizing and interpreting these body-states and using them to make navi-
gational judgements. Working within the neurosciences, Antonio Damasio
defines emotions as these brain representations of body-states, introducing yet
another conceptualization. He explicitly builds on Spinoza’s philosophy, but his
terminology, and his approach, is different. In Damasio’s conceptual system,
the term emotion is generally used to refer to the non-conscious but observ-
able physiological elements of appraisal (affect in many other approaches). It
is opposed to feeling (emotion for some), which in his vocabulary is the men-
tal experience of emotion, and considered to be unobservable by interacting
partners. (Damasio 2000: 15, 20–21; see also Lane et al. 2000: 8) In Damasio’s
model, feeling remains on an unconscious sensory level, and the point when it
becomes conscious is the “feeling of feeling” (Damasio 2000: 20–21). Affect, in
this conceptual system, only refers to “the entire topic of emotion and feeling,
including, of necessity, the subjacent processes of motivation and the underly-
ing states of pain and pleasure” (ibid.: 16).

. For a reassessment of Tomkin’s approach from a cultural studies perspective, see Sedg-
wick (2003: 97–108).
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

Table 1. Terminological grids: Tomkins vs. Damasio vs. Massumi

Neurobiological,
preconscious, Global/
bodily Awareness Interpreted Social overarching

Tomkins affect feeling emotion – –

Damasio emotion feeling feeling of feeling – affect
Massoumi affect feeling emotion affect

Table 1 provides a crude comparative typology of the terminologies of Massumi,

Tomkins and Damasio. Out of the dozens of affect theories available across dis-
ciplines, I am not singling out these three to indicate they are the best sources,
or even to indicate that they are the most central for me or this book (although I
have been greatly inspired by them all), but to illustrate the terminological com-
plexities with the help of three research agendas representing three different fields
of study that have been influential in social and cultural theories of affect. The
table aims to show four things: one, that across fields of study, researchers exam-
ining affect tend to share an interest in the pre-conscious, visceral and embodied
­demonstrations of emotional arousal; two, that they may focus their attention dif-
ferently across the continuum of potential foci of interest; and three, that they may
use contradictory terminology to explain similar phenomena. And finally, four, to
fully understand the topic at hand, one needs to be willing and able to move across
the spectrum, from the neural to the social, and sometimes also to turn a blind eye
to terminological mismatches. To this end, we need many different approaches,
­epistemologies and methodologies. Categorizations are necessary tools, created
for analytical purposes, but as Sara Ahmed reminds us, the world these categoriza-
tions are introduced to is fluid and its boundaries porous:
We have a course “Gender, Affect and the Body” and I’ve just changed how it is
taught because my impression was (from essays that students were delivering)
that there was a great degree of confidence that affect was this over here and emo-
tion was that over there and that this distinction mapped onto different bodies of
work. But the distinction was actually obscuring the histories of how certain bod-
ies of work came to exist in the first place. I encourage my students to think about
it more in terms of separation as an activity. You can break an egg to separate the
yolk from the white, but you have to separate what is not separate. Separation is
an activity, not a noun. And I think that in some contributions to affect studies
the concept has come to replace the thing. So affect is treated as an agent that
is doing things on its own accord. I think you can separate affect and emotion,
you even can have a rationale for doing that, but it needs to be understood as a
method allowing you to do certain things and not as corresponding to a natural
distinction that exists in the world. The world we are describing is messy – if we
 Translation and Affect

have clear distinctions we’re actually losing our connection to that world. Clear
distinctions for a messy experience or a messy situation are neither helpful for a
better understanding of reality nor interesting for the debate.
 (Ahmed in Schmitz & Ahmed 2014: 98–99)

The messy terminology can be taken to signal that the area under study does not
easily fall into distinct categories. The feeling human body/mind embedded in
social and cultural structures does not cut nicely into tight categories capturable
by the means of linguistic labels. Rather, we are dealing with a complex phenom-
enon and fluid continuums. But the varied scholarly approaches also allow us to
appreciate that the complexity stretches from neurobiology through cognition/
interpretation to the interpersonal/social, and that it needs to be understood both
form the perspective of microevents (such as barely noticeable facial microexpres-
sions referred to in Chapter 5 below) and macrolevel cultural stances (such as the
culturally conditioned dualistic understanding of translating discussed in Chapter
4 below). What is significant is that each approach expands on the middle ground;
on the subjectively felt, recognized and interpreted emotions that allow a person to
state “I am happy/sad/angry” or any number of other emotional states. This poten-
tial for expanding is the promise of theorizing affect in any discipline, opening
up avenues for inquiry beyond cognition and beyond the identified emotions of
individuals, both towards physiological and pre-cognitive sensation and towards
the sociocultural embeddedness of affects.
The choice of focus in the complex landscape of affect is based on each
researcher’s personal preferences but also on disciplinary affiliations. Massumi rep-
resents cultural theory and the political sciences, and he therefore quite naturally
leans towards the social effects of affects, and their biopolitical aspects. Tomkins, in
turn, comes from psychology and Damasio from neuroscience, and in accordance
to their respective disciplinary traditions, they both present a more individualized
understanding of the biological, visceral or somatic states on the one hand (i.e., the
body), and our cognitive-mental recognitions of those states, on the other (i.e., the
mind). Whereas Massumi zooms out, Damasio and Tomkins zoom in. They focus
on affects as a body-internal issue, as a biological and physiological phenomenon.
This view is far from solipsist, however, and Tomkins builds heavily on (involun-
tary) facial expressions of affect in interpersonal encounters, creating a rich area
of shared interest with interaction research and studies on face-work. He has even
argued that the face – and not the brain – is the principle organ for affect:
If, as I believe, the affects are the primary motives of man, and if, as I also believe,
the face is the primary site of the affects, then the face is the man. Every man has
always been interested in faces, fallen in love with a face, repelled by some faces,
comforted by others, bored by some faces, but psychologists have nonetheless
been the last to know. (Tomkins 1995: 263)
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

But even when considered within interpersonal encounters, the bodily view of
affect still focuses on the person being in a state of affect. In interaction, affect
can then be seen as a “fifth columnist” beyond our control and at least potentially
working against our wishes:

Affect gives you away: the telltale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in
your voice; the sparkle of glee in their eyes. You may protest your innocence, but
we both know, don’t we, that who you really are, or what you really are, is going to
be found in the pumping of your blood, the quantity and quality of your perspi-
ration, the breathless anticipation in your throat, the way you can’t stop yourself
from grinning, the glassy sheen of your eyes. Affect is the cuckoo in the nest;
the fifth columnist out to undermine you; your personal polygraph machine.
(Highmore 2010: 118)

The above quotation also seems to imply that the physiological, measurable indi-
cators of affect are more trustworthy than our narrations of our affective stances;
that they tell the true tale. Our perspiration levels, pupillometric measurements
or pulse are the polygraph machine against which the accuracy of our reported
emotions and value judgements can be measured. Indeed, some researchers want
to see the turn to emotions as a turn away from the language- and discourse-
oriented phase of poststructuralist social sciences, emphasizing that “words are
the one thing that emotions are not” (Franks 2007: 39, citing Katz 1999; cf. Clough
2010). Undoubtedly, there is more to affect than our verbal awareness allows us to
account for, and bodily felt information is relevant in itself, not only in its transla-
tions into discourse. And as anyone with experience of interactive research meth-
ods such as interviewing will know, any verbal reports are themselves subject to
affective conditioning of the new interactive event they are part of.
In social and cultural research, emphasis on the bodily aspects of affect brings
to the forefront elements that may have previously escaped scholarly attention. For
some, this has been the most exciting element of affect theories, and a welcome
move away from the previous linguistic turn and the predominance of discourse
analysis. Still, the kind of theorizing of affect that entirely eschews talk and text
seems unnecessarily restricted in general, and undesirably narrow for studying
such text- and talk-based activities as translating and interpreting in particular.
Indeed, we are often affecting and being affected by verbalizations, as Margaret
Wetherell (2012: 19) points out: “it is the discursive that very frequently makes
affect powerful, makes it radical and provides the means for affect to travel.” When
affect needs to travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries, translation and
interpreting become embedded in the process, and it will depend on their success
how powerful, radical, or even mobile the affect in question is and what kinds of
changes are instigated.
 Translation and Affect

Emphasizing the complexity of affect, Wetherell (2012: 62; italics in the origi-
nal) sums up the current psychological-neuroscientific understanding of affect as
follows:
The picture that psychology and neuroscience typically now paints of affect is
of a highly dynamic, interacting composite or assemblage of autonomic bodily
responses (e.g. sweating, trembling, blushing), other bodily actions (approach-
ing or avoiding), subjective feelings and other qualia, cognitive processing (e.g.
perception, attention, memory, decision-making), the firing and projecting of
neural circuits (e.g. from the thalamus to the cortex and the amygdala), verbal
reports (from exclamations to narratives) and communicative signals such as fa-
cial ­expressions.

Although the view described by Wetherell above takes into account both bodily
and mental processes, and both experienced and reported affect, it still keeps affect
primarily as a person-internal matter, one that is only expressed or narrated to
the outside world. Even when scholars acknowledge the role of one’s sociocultural
environment in emotions, the focus often tends to be on the individual reacting to
and learning from the surrounding context (Damasio 2000: 17).
At its core, the debate about language is over meaning versus sense. In mean-
ing-making we verbalize, report and narrate, whereas sensing is preconscious,
nonverbal, experienced. As such, neither side can win. To be more precise, nei-
ther must win, if we want to have a global understanding of the phenomenon.
Wetherell’s own approach that sees affective practices as tangles of activities that
are constantly in motion is appealing in its flexibility. Affective practices can be
improvised or trained, or regulated repetitions; they can be habitual and conven-
tional or creative and elastic. Importantly, affects are not seen as objects inside the
self but as responses to a situation and therefore relational by nature. This relation-
ality and intersubjectivity makes the self a nexus that connects the various forces,
both verbalized and non-discursive:
The individual is a site in which multiple sources of activation and informa-
tion about body states, situations, past experiences, linguistic forms, flowering
thoughts, etc. become woven together. (Wetherell 2012: 22)

The individual, however, is not a solipsistic creature. It makes sense that research-
ers in the social sciences and cultural studies emphasize the social nature of affect
and our mutual interdependency on the affective states of others. Another field
of research into the social nature of emotions is the sociology of emotions. This
line of inquiry goes back to the 1970s. Sociologists had, of course, not been oblivi-
ous to the role of emotion in social reality before, but the programmatic reaffir-
mation that “emotions very frequently result from real, imagined, anticipated, or
recollected outcomes of social relationships” (Kemper 1978: 30) launched a new
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

paradigm within sociology (Bericat 2016). Emotions are present in all social phe-
nomena. The idea that the context of our social relations is where our emotions
emerge, are experienced and have meaning lead to the realization that sociol-
ogy needs to study the affective structures and emotional dynamics of social life
(ibid.: 7). In other words, the sociology of emotions needs to study both the social
nature of emotions and the emotional nature of social reality (ibid.: 5):

Loneliness, envy, hate, fear, shame, pride, horror, resentment, grief, nostalgia,
trust, sadness, satisfaction, joy, anger, happiness, frustration and a myriad of
other feelings emerge in specific social situations, expressing in the individual’s
bodily consciousness the rich spectrum of forms of human social interaction and
relationships. Understanding an emotion means understanding the situation and
social relation that produces it. … any description, explanation or sociological
understanding of a social phenomenon is incomplete, and therefore false, if it
does not incorporate the feeling subject into its study of structures and social pro-
cesses.(Bericat 2012: 3–4; italics in the original)

Are you confused yet? I confess I was, and to an extent I still am. For quite some
time, defining affect seemed like being trapped in a maze. In my early writings on
affect and the affective in translation, one can follow a trajectory where I desperately
try to pin the discussion on one affect theory or another, shifting grounds with dif-
ferent datasets and research questions, but where I also lose my bearings and try to
regain them as I go along. I was also feeling increasingly undecided about selecting
between the words “affect” and “emotion”, and one can observe how I waver between
the two in my publications. Two texts helped me gain my bearings. The first one,
an article by Claudia Wassmann (2016), made me realize that the essence of the
matter was perhaps in danger of getting lost in translation. In her article, “Forgot-
ten Origins, Occluded Meanings: Translation of Emotion Terms”, she discusses the
convoluted trajectory of terms such as affect, emotion and feeling as translations
of various core texts were produced between German and English. The translation
strategies highlighted different aspects of the concepts, depending on the aims and
aspiration of the scholars-cum-translators. This kind of reframing in translation
should not come as a surprise to us translation scholars, as many of us have worked
on identifying similar translation trajectories in other texts. Still, coming across this
article was a relief for me: it allowed me to fully appreciate that the struggles over
appropriate definitions and the turf fights over acceptable terminology are, at
least to some (and probably significant) extent, issues of translation, of cultural
and indeed affective attachments and appropriations of particular paradigms and
dominant languages.
Many of the conceptual networks Wassmann studies in her article were origi-
nally coined in German and only travelled into English in translation. In today’s
 Translation and Affect

world of academic endeavours, the uncontested dominant language is English,

and researchers working with (also) other languages find themselves in a situation
where they need to map these other languages onto a terrain already charted and
signposted by the English lexicon, in this case working to differentiate between
affect, emotion and feeling. Hence also my struggles in my native language, Finn-
ish. In my language, unless one wants to revert to the handy loan words of affekti
and emootio, one is left with mapping the most obvious parallel term tunne4 with
one of the three and then trying to innovatively sort out the remaining two (that
could have equally well been translated with tunne) with somewhat forced solu-
tions such as tuntemus or tunnetila. Still, it took Wassmann’s article for me to trust
my own gut feeling that the various categorizations I kept reading about and trying
to sort out were perhaps not fully sortable because they were based on fundamen-
tally arbitrary linguistic expressions and categorizations of an equally fundamen-
tally intertwined complex of the human psyche and interpersonality. With this,
I do not wish to imply that it would be unnecessary or pointless to use precise
terminology, accurate translations and careful definitions. What I do wish to say
is that no matter how much energy we spend teasing out differences and similari-
ties, at the end of the day one scholar’s feeling will be another scholar’s affect, and
the borders between the bodily, the mental, the cognitive and the interpersonal
and the social are man-made methodological shorthands to disentangle a com-
plex that does not respect these, or any, boundaries. What is more important is to
pay attention to the concepts being discussed, and whether the author is making
claims that concern neural activity in the amygdala, or a consciously recognized
and narratable/narrated state of mind, or interpersonal flows of energy, or all of
these, or something else.
The other text which helped me sort out my own thoughts is the book Affect
and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding by Margaret Wetherell (2012).
This is a reference I have already cited numerous times above. It is not a kind book,
in the sense that it is very straightforward in its criticism of the “wrong turns” the
author sees affect studies have taken, but it proved invaluable to me in providing
both an overview of the terrain and signposting on how to navigate, and in offer-
ing a global perspective I could relate to. The focus on affective practices discussed
above allows one to sidestep some longstanding debates such as the primariness of
body versus mind, and individual versus social, as well as the role of narration and
interpretation. Instead, these can be seen as a bundle of relations that interact with
each other within an affective practice. It also leaves the more pragmatic questions

. From the general verb tuntua, with a wide range of meanings, from having emotions and
feelings to a sensation or a hunch.
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

of data and methodology open-ended, and does not predetermine either philo-
sophical theorizing or empirical testing.
The impulse to separate what is bodily felt from what is cognitively recognized
or verbally or otherwise expressed reflects the long rationalist tradition of keep-
ing “the body” and “the mind” firmly separate, going back to Cartesian dualism
(for an overview see Muñoz Martín 2016). It can also be seen as a methodological
inheritance from the hard sciences, where the somatic level is seen to offer pos-
sibilities for new measurements and hence new discoveries. To explore whether
this promise can lead to new insights in the human sciences as well, the somatic
and the cognitive levels need to be methodologically disintegrated (Damasio 2000:
19). Interdisciplinary empirical studies may indeed lead to new discoveries about
human interaction. However, the desire for analytical duality also testifies to how
modern Western science has often found the mysterious or more hidden layers of
affect difficult to handle. Affects may well affect our being in the world in many
ways that we do not know or cannot recognize. Although contemporary West-
ern science operates with tight and objectifiable categorizations, this holistic view
is not that alien to earlier understandings. Current psychology, for example, is
empirically and somatically oriented, but in the etymology of the word psyche one
finds the meaning of “soul”. In today’s disciplinary understandings, the soul seems
to be a hopelessly non-scientific concept, but to understand how affects affect us
and how we affect others through affects, we need to operate with fuzzy categories,
working less with readily defined objects and more like explorers finding their way
into a topic that is complex and deeply relational.
One of the complexities is the role of the body in affect. Affect is (also) embod-
ied, that much largely everyone agrees. But what this embodiment entails has
degrees. First, there is the issue of body versus mind, and the problem of under-
standing how cognitive processes take place. Neuroscience focuses on the brain,
and brain of course is a bodily organ, and any approach centred around cognitive
brain functions, be it in the cortex, hippocampus, thalamus or hypothalamus or
elsewhere, is by definition dealing with the body. But since we usually conceive
the brain as the residence of the mind, the issue of the brain versus the lived body
tends to create a division where the body is the non-brain. For some, this focus
on the bodily, on the visceral layer, is the core of affect and the main rationale
for any affect theory, and they are eager to plunge into the “murky connections
between fabrics and feelings, between the glutinous and the guffaw (for exam-
ple)” (Highmore 2010: 119). For others, the body appears as kinetic, dynamic and
situated in space and time – a body that moves as it feels and feels itself moving,
and while moving affects other bodies and is affected by them (Probyn 2010: 77).
Some philosophize even more open-ended and unbounded definitions for the
bodily. Deleuze’s (1988: 127) summary of Spinoza’s thinking is that the body “can
 Translation and Affect

be ­anything: it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a

linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”
The spectrum of understandings of what bodies can be seems to be similar to
the person-internal–social continuum discussed above. A body can refer to any-
thing, from a contained and measurable biological organism to a fluid relational
collectivity, and it can be human or non-human. There are bodies with organs, and
those without. Deleuze and Quattari (in a fairly dense English translation by Brian
Massumi) ask not what a body is but what it can do and with whom:

We will never ask what a [body without organs] means, as signified or signifi-
er; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions
with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensi-
ties, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and
with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge.
(Deleuze & Quattari 1987: 4)

To answer these questions, the body is perceived as a constellation of unstable

and changing relationships, an assemblage. These material and machinic assem-
blages of physical objects (ibid.: 7) and their affective capacities open up a radi-
cally expanded horizon for exploring affects. A particularly interesting interface of
bodies with and without organs for our times is that between a human body and
technology, and the assemblages they can enter into (see Chapter 7). I am tempted
to propose that we need to apply a holistic approach not only to the study of affect
but also to our understanding of the body, and consequently, to our thinking of
embodied affect. And as the embodied affect is also embedded, the spatial and
material relations and their affective qualities also need to be acknowledged (see
Chapter 6).
The kind of interpretive flexibility that postmodern cultural theories such as
Massumi’s exhibit may be difficult to accommodate in fields with different tradi-
tions of thinking, such as psychology. One significant and recurrent difference
between the terms “emotion” and “affect” is that while emotion, as a primarily
psychological term, tends to foreground the individual, the use of affect, especially
in the social sciences, tends to be connected to a view of affect as an interpretable
and narratable state and as a social force. In other words, while the former tends
to take emotion or affect as a noun, the latter also builds on the idea of affect as a
verb. Although this is not a clear-cut division and terminologies vary, as my brief
discussion of the various usages above aims to show, it is clear that researchers
interested in emotion or affect position themselves differently on the spectrums
between the biological and the non-organic, the mental and the cognitive, and
the interpersonal and the social. I acknowledge that with my own background in
the sociology of translation, with a longstanding investment in thinking through
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

issues such as translation ethics and translators’ agency, my research interests are
at the more social end of the continuum from the biological and individual to the
social and collective. In the chapters that follow, I emphasize the interpersonal and
the social elements of affecting and being affected.
I acknowledge my significant shortcomings in the clinical research traditions
required for serious engagement with the biological study of the human body,
and in none of the following chapters will you find me interpreting brain images,
perspiration levels or pupillometric data. This is not to be seen as a willingness
to ignore the bodily side of affect. On the contrary. With notions such as bodily
capital (Chapter 5), I wish to encourage researchers to also consider the relevance
of translators’ and interpreters’ corporeality, the fact that also bodies matter, and
that they matter affectively. We affect and are affected through our bodies as well
as our minds, and we are conditioned by our material and virtual spatiality that
directs us and modifies our ability to affect. This is more easily recognizable in
the case of interpreters whose embodied situatedness in interaction has a direct
bearing on how the situation evolves. Interpreters also operate orally, that is, they
use their body as their instrument. In contrast, the affective layers of written trans-
lation may appear less central. This, however, is a misperception: the loss of the
bodily layer in written communication only reinforces the relevance of affectivity
on the textual level. These two modes simply operate differently, and highlight dif-
ferent aspects of affect. Having said that, I also want to emphasize that although
translations come to readers in a textually transmitted, non-bodied form, human
translators also have an embodied existence, which affects their life and work in a
number of ways. They, too, are located in specific places, and are bodily affected by
their translation work.
Translating and interpreting do not affect only translators and interpreters.
“Bodies are empowered and disempowered by their interactions with other bod-
ies,” as Tim Rayner (2014) summarizes Spinoza’s argument, and “from the nature
of this affect, we can tell whether or not this interaction is good, or healthy, for
us, or not.” This is where questions of affect come very close to my other long-
standing topic of interest, ethics. The activities of translating and interpreting are
foundationally relational and interpersonal, and the experience, good or bad, of
“living with translation” extends to all parties involved. Here is how Primo Levi
– in a translation by Harry Thomas – describes the embodied feeling of being
translated:
When the author comes across a passage of his work translated into a language he
knows, the author feels – one at a time or all at once – flattered, betrayed, enno-
bled, x-rayed, castrated, flattened, raped, adorned, killed. It is rare that an author
remains indifferent toward a translator, however renowned or unknown, who has
stuck his nose and fingers into the author’s guts: the author would like to send the
 Translation and Affect

translator – one at a time or all at once – the author’s heart (carefully packed), a
check, a laurel wreath, or the mafia’s enforcers. (Levi 2017; emphasis added)

To sum up, affect affects translating and interpreting in multiple ways. Some of
these are sticky and immediately recognizable, and they bear witness to the notion
of translating and interpreting as affective labour, as activities that are funda-
mentally inscribed with managing emotions. This argument will be elaborated in
Chapter 2.

1.4 What can we do with affect?

We teach young scholars to define their core concepts. Above I tried to practice
what I preach. Since it is evident that we are dealing with a potentially confusing
concept that has acquired multiple meanings in different research paradigms, a
discussion of theoretical affinities is necessary to allow the reader to see which
elements are foregrounded in this book, and also to judge which are pushed aside.
Still, more important than answering the question “what is affect” may well be to
respond to other kinds of questions. I sympathize with how Sara Ahmed (2014: 4)
describes the task she has given herself in The Cultural Politics of Emotion:

So rather than asking ‘What are emotions?’, I will ask, ‘What do emotions do?’ In
asking this question, I will not offer a singular theory of emotion, or one account
of the work that emotions do. Rather, I will track how emotions circulate between
bodies, examining how they ‘stick’ as well as move. … I will not offer a full review
of this history [of thinking on emotions], which would be an impossible task. …
In the face of this history, my task is a modest one: to show how my thinking has
been informed by my contact with some work on emotions.

Looking at different aspects of translating and interpreting through the lens of the
affective, I have posed myself the following question: what can the focus on the
affective add to our existing understanding of translatorial practices? This is what I
aim to give at least tentative answers to in the different chapters of this book. In the
social sciences, the 21st-century scholarly focus on affect has sometimes been seen
as a move away from challenging issues, as an escape route (Hemmings 2005).
The affect turn has also often been hailed as a new departure away from the ear-
lier poststructuralist obsession with language (Wetherell 2012: 19). In translation
studies, I see no such need for escape, but a lot of promise. In any case, the move
away from language is difficult to agree with and needs to be qualified in the con-
text of studying language-based activities. While I agree that focussing on affect
creates new openings that enable us to escape the non sequiturs of poststructural-
ism, I argue that while affect can indeed be defined as either preconscious bodily
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

reactions (when taking an individualistic and anthropocentric approach) or as a

form of energy flowing between persons and things (when taking a situated view),
language still remains one central vehicle for transmitting affects and affecting
others, and verbalizations are also our main method for describing, explaining and
interpreting the experiences of affect we and others have. In a book that discusses
language-based activities such as oral and written translation, the roles of language
cannot and will not be overlooked. Rather, I see affect as one lens through which
we can revisit many elements familiar from previous translation and interpreting
research, from textual analysis, translation strategies and aesthetics to reception
studies, translational workplace studies and process research.
But why should we worry about affect? Does it matter? I believe it does. For
theorists, the role of affect in “living with translation”, at all stages of production
and reception, with all the involved complexities and situationalities, offers chal-
lenges that are not yet sufficiently resolved in TS literature. The recent rise of affect
theory in cultural studies highlights the necessity to take affect into account in cul-
turally oriented translation research as well. Even more compelling is the evidence
from recent neuroscience: if we agree that translating is decision-making and if we
now know that a large part of that decision-making is guided by affective factors,
and that these factors largely operate under the radar of our consciousness, affect
provides a significant explanatory factor we are yet to fully uncover. The lens of
affect is also a good antidote to a tendency sometimes found in translation stud-
ies to automatically place translators and interpreters in the “good-guys” category,
assuming them to always be virtuous, ethical and rightminded in communica-
tion, building bridges for others and never seeking their own. Affecting and being
affected is decisively undecided in terms of moral value and positivity. Affects may
be joyful, virtuous and good, but they may also be unwanted, and lead to poor
outcomes and suffering. Gut-reactions may lead you to make right choices, or then
not. Affect is both/and.
Currently, there is no general theory of affect (although there is something
called affect theory both in cultural studies and in psychology), and it is thus
perhaps not too surprising that there is no shared understanding of affect within
translation studies either, or necessarily a need for one. Affects are muddy, vague
and hard to capture (as soon as a bodily felt affect is verbalized, for example, one
can argue that it is no longer an affect but something else). Affects can be seen as
either individual or collective, and they are a shifting and changeable phenom-
enon rather than an absolute, on/off switch; a process rather than a fixed position.
The same can be said of affect theory: it, too, is muddy, vague and changeable,
both methodologically and conceptually. But the notion of affect can lend us new
and valuable viewpoints into translating and into the reception of translations. I
am convinced that a thicker affective layer needs to be added to our descriptions
 Translation and Affect

of translational phenomena, functioning as a set of explanatory mechanisms for

why translations turn out the way they do, as well as why readers react to them
the way they do, and how and why translations circulate and make waves (or not)
in a particular cultural context; for explaining the public service interpreters’ pre-
carious position in interaction and in society; for understanding the discontents
of industry–translator relations; and for the changing cultural status and social
spaces of translations, and many other issues pertinent to translation and inter-
preting research and practice.
Methodologically, this affective layer can be approached via various research
paradigms. One option is to take the route of the natural sciences, operating with
tools such as the EEG, tomography, skin conductance measurements and pupil-
lometrics (pupil size, for example, is known to respond to positive and negative
affects), and to bring the questions of affect in contact with recent process stud-
ies, or cognitive translation studies (see O’Brien 2011: 5–6 and passim; Muñoz
Martín 2016). Another course of research is to study experiences, both as they
unfold and those in the past or in the future, in the form of memories, perceptions
or anticipation (see the examples discussed in Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016). In
recent usability research, increasing focus has been placed on user experience, and
methods developed in that area may be used to uncover both the experiences of
translators and those of the users of translations (Suojanen, Koskinen and Tuom-
inen 2015a). A third route will involve a return to literary and cultural theories,
that is, a renewed engagement of translation studies with theories of aesthetics,
combined with a continued engagement with cognitive stylistics (see Boase-
Beier 2006). Undoubtedly, other avenues can also be found. Whichever route one
selects, an increased understanding of the role of affect in translating will enhance
our knowledge of what translation is about.
It would be premature, I think, to start constructing a paradigm or research
model for studying affect in translation studies, and given the complexity of the
phenomenon under study, it may be permanently too restrictive to commit to any
single line of enquiry and all its concomitant presuppositions. I admit that several
years ago when I first started building an interest in affect, and even in 2016 when
I first started writing this manuscript, I had a vision of mastering the topic and
providing a fixed model for future research. Failing to arrive at solid conceptu-
alizations was a source of great frustration to me for quite some time. The more
I have delved into the literature in a number of fields, however, the more I have
learned to appreciate and value the multitude of views I have encountered. In this
introduction and in the following chapters, I have very consciously avoided pro-
posing any unified research model, or even elaborating a strict theoretical frame-
work to be consistently applied across the chapters of this one book. Instead, I
 Chapter 1. Affecting and being affected 

have traced the various aspects and contexts of translating and interpreting to
tease out the affective resonances in many commonly discussed areas of study.
I very much agree with Seigworth and Gregg’s (2010: 4; italics in the original)
understanding that the promise of affect theory lies in illuminating the various
“belongings to this world”:
Because affect emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some
dialectical reconciliation of cleanly oppositional elements or primary units, it
makes easy compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and
blurs. … [A]ffect’s impinging/extruded belonging to worlds, bodies, and their in-
betweenness – affect in its immanence – signals the very promise of affect theory
too: casting illumination upon the “not yet” of body’s doing, casting a line along
the hopeful (though also fearful) cusp of emergent futurity, casting its lot with
the infinitely connectable, impersonal, and contagious belongings to this world.

The chapters that follow are an attempt to map ways of theorizing these belong-
ings in the context of translating and interpreting. Although the primary aim is
theoretical, my approach is also empirical and pragmatic. With the exception
of Chapter 2, which lays further theoretical ground for the rest of the book and
Chapter 8 which is based on reflections on my own teaching experience from
the perspective of affect, the various chapters advance the theoretical argument
also through reports on findings from empirical data, teasing out some potential
avenues for future study into the various belongings to the worlds of translating
and interpreting. Chapter 3 is the most directly textual chapter in its orientation,
focussing on appraising and modulating affects in the textual processes of transla-
tion. It looks into source text analysis, translation strategies and reception from
the interlaced perspectives of affects and affinity. Chapter 4 engages with experi-
enced affect in literary translation, studying autobiographical material provided by
a famous literary translator, Pentti Saarikoski. Chapter 5 investigates the affective
and bodily capital of public service interpreters and discusses professional norma-
tive expectations from these perspectives. The core concepts of Chapter 6 are space
and place, and they are examined in connection with translators’ workplaces, the
spaces available for translation within artistic performances and the playful spaces
of translation in the cyberspace. Chapter 7 discusses current and future translation
technology from the point of view of affect, and in Chapter 8 I try to tackle the
repercussions of all of the above in translator training as well as the affects of the
trainers themselves. Chapter 9 concludes the book.
Each chapter contributes to the main argument put forth in the book, but they
are also written in a manner that allows readers to choose according to their indi-
vidual interests. In addition to the affect theories discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, a
number of different theoretical frameworks are brought into play, from appraisal
 Translation and Affect

theory (Chapter 3) and work engagement (Chapter 4) to the concepts of social

capital and performativity (Chapter 5), Doreen Massey’s theorization on space and
place (Chapter 6), and the many forms of empathy (Chapter 8). These theories
are introduced within the chapter in question. The more general theoretical back-
ground introduced in this chapter and the next one informs all of the discussion
that will follow.
 chapter 2

Affective labour and sticky affects

2.1 Affective labour

The main argument that runs through this book is that translating and interpret-
ing are (among other things) forms of affective labour, and that engaging with
affect is therefore of extreme value in understanding translating and interpreting
as complex, interpersonal, situated and embodied forms of human communi-
cation. Translational activities are fundamentally meditational, and translators
and interpreters participate in communication that is not their own, speak-
ing for others. This entails listening empathetically to understand what others
are trying to express, sounding the context of reception to navigate potential
rocky patches and then performing the actual communicative act with an air of
detachment while at the same time communicating trustworthiness and profes-
sionalism. All this requires constant management of felt and performed affects,
that is, affective labour.
Several different concepts and approaches have been developed to capture the
role of affects and emotions at work since the early contributions of a number of
mid-20th-century sociologists. For example, C. Wright Mills (1951) analysed the
alienation of the modern work force, and Talcott Parson’s classic study (1951) iden-
tified affective neutrality as a core element of modern professionalism. Another
core reference of the time is Erving Goffman, and his thesis The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (1959). The term emotional labour is often associated with
The Managed Heart, a classic treatise by Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983/2003), in
which Hochschild analyses the role of managing emotions in particular occupa-
tions, namely those where the employee is either in a face-to-face or voice-to-voice
contact with clients, with the task of evoking particular emotions in them, and in
which the employer manages the employees’ emotional conduct through training
and supervision (Hochschild 1983/2003: 147). To illustrate the different features
of emotional labour, she analyses the expected conduct, facial expressions and
friendly customer service of flight attendants.
 Translation and Affect

To be consistent with my chosen terminology, below I will mainly use the term
affective labour (rather than emotional labour). This terminological choice also
creates ties to its well-known collaborative usage by two political theorists, Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri (e.g., 2001). The term affective labour was originally
promoted by Hardt (1999), who situated affective labour within the framework of
immaterial labour, that is, the production of services, knowledge, communication
as well as affects. The creation and manipulation of affects, the production and
distribution of feelings, and the management of affinity or distance, all require
affective labour. According to Hardt (ibid.: 90), capitalist postmodernization has
foregrounded immaterial labour, placing affective labour, in particular, “at the very
pinnacle of the hierarchy of labouring forms”. It has spread across the labour force
and to all kinds of tasks (ibid.: 97). Hence, it has also acquired significant subver-
sive and biopolitical potential in the sense of power to create, manage and control
populations and to produce collective subjectivities (ibid.: 98). Also in the study of
translating and interpreting, the economic and political aspects of affective labour
cannot be overlooked. This is where affective labour ties together with the cultural
politics of affect and affective economy (Ahmed 2014).
Affective economy is also Hochschild’s core point; the subtitle of her book is
Commercialization of Human Feeling. An essential element of emotional labour is
that while the aim is to appear authentic, it is manufactured and staged, as well as
bought and sold. The airline hostesses and other professional hospitality workers
are expected to learn the feeling rules applicable to their trade and to regulate their
feelings accordingly, performing being flight attendants. Human interaction, in
Erving Goffman’s classic view, is performative. That is, as participants of a given
occasion, we act in a manner which serves to influence the other participants and
to give them a given definition of the situation at hand (Goffman 1959/1990: 26,
231). We also act in a manner we expect others to find acceptable, to be able to
maintain a “veneer of consensus” by asserting commonly shared values (ibid.: 21).
Goffman talks about the art of impression management and the requirement of
dramaturgical discipline to avoid gaffes and blunders. The focus of this discipline
is both affective and embodied, as the performer needs to control the face and the
voice: “Actual affective response must be concealed and an appropriate affective
response must be displayed” (ibid.: 211).
Impression management may sound devious, but it is a regular part of social
interaction. In everyday life we constantly manage the impressions of our selves
and succumb to our pre-assigned social roles either consciously or sub-con-
sciously. Goffman’s argument is built on theatre metaphors. If all the world is not
a stage, Goffman says, it is not easy to specify how it is not, as “life itself is a dra-
matically enacted thing” (1959/1990: 78; cf. p. 246). The expectations concerning
a given social role tend to become institutionalized in abstract stereotypes, and
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

actors entering a particular occupational role will usually need to adapt to existing
front expectations. In their performance, the occupational setting and stage props
will provide the scene. For some occupations, the correct scene and props are cru-
cially important (think of the operating theatre or shop floor, or the interpreting
booth, for example); for others, there is more flexibility. Regardless of the setting,
the “personal” front of elements such as gender, age and racial characteristics, size,
looks, posture, speech patterns, gestures and facial expressions, forms the actor’s
essential “expressive equipment” (ibid.: 34). Some of this equipment is more tran-
sitory, others are quite fixed, and some we are born with.
Some scholars want to maintain a clear difference between affective labour
and emotional labour. For example, James J. Thomas and Jennifer G. Correa (2016:
10–11) signal the latter to be about individual reactions to existing cultural con-
texts whereas the former produces those cultural contexts. The issue of how much
contexts determine individual behaviour and to what extent individual behaviour
can forge a change in the context is a repetition of the long-standing structure
versus agency debates in sociology, or the nature versus nurture ones in biology. It
may be impossible to determine which is more dominant, and it may make more
sense to see people as “suspended in webs of significance they themselves have
spun,” to quote Clifford Geertz’s famous line (1973: 5).
While it may sometimes be advantageous to maintain a differentiation
between emotion (in the sense of individual, psychological phenomenon) and
affect (in the sense of either a precognitive bodily event or a contextual force),
too-rigid categorizations may also hinder our ability to observe and understand
the many roles of affects in everyday contexts. The difference between emotional
labour and affective labour is, to my mind at least, more a question of focus than
of kind. Both concepts were first developed in response to the move from manu-
facturing to service society, which was seen as one of the underlying causes for the
rising dominance of affective or emotional labour. They also share a critical stance
towards the capitalist ethos of monetarizing affectivity and emotions. The Hoch-
schildian perspective indeed focuses on appearances and modulation of personal
emotion display, but the purpose of this personal activity is to produce and dis-
tribute affects, either collectively or vis-à-vis an individual client. In the same vein,
Hardt (1999: 96) emphasizes the human quality of affective labour even if it would
not happen in person. Both approaches also frame the phenomenon similarly, in
the sense of identifying particular occupations that are oriented towards affective
behaviour such as caring, comforting, welcoming, reassuring and entertaining.
For Hochschild, typical examples of emotional labour are to be found in service
activities; Hardt underlines the role of communication and affect in the contem-
porary knowledge-intensive economy, which he labels “informational economy”.
We might just as well choose to call it affective economy.
 Translation and Affect

The term service here covers a large range of activities from health care, educa-
tion, and finance, to transportation, entertainment, and advertising. The jobs, for
the most part, are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More importantly,
they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, infor-
mation, communication, and affect. In this sense, we can call the postindustrial
economy an informational economy. (Hardt 1999: 91)

In this new economy, Hardt (1999: 96) argues, affective labour is embedded in the
moments of human interaction and communication, where it produces intangible
effects: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a
sense of connectedness or community”. In multilingual contexts, this is the sphere
of translating and interpreting.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to finecomb the similarities and dif-
ferences in the various approaches to emotional and affective labour and their
historical trajectories. Instead, following the logic of consilience and bridge con-
cepts discussed in Chapter 1, I use the concept of affective labour in a broad sense,
to denote labour that aims to produce and modulate affects in either personal
interaction (such as most interpreting scenarios) or in textually transmitted com-
munication (in translation). Affective labour also refers to the performance in and
through which particular affects (such as fear of betrayal) are being managed and
particular affects (such as competence and trustworthiness) are put on display.
This approach will effectively render all professions and occupations as affective
labour. While this may seem like an unwanted outcome of a classification project,
I feel it makes perfect sense: as humans we bring our affects to any endeavour we
engage in and to all our interactions with others and ourselves. While accepting
affectivity as a part of the human condition, the notion of affective labour allows
us to analytically explore what kinds of affective displays and which strategies of
affect management, and to which degree, are typical to particular occupations and
working-life scenarios, translating and interpreting included.
If we consider affective labour to be related to the management of affects and
emotions of oneself and others, and if we accept the view of translating and inter-
preting as forms of interpersonal, situated and embodied human communication,
with the resulting affective and emotional complexities involved and also bodily
felt, we also need to acknowledge the role of affective labour in successful profes-
sional performance. Or rather, its multiple roles, as affectivity comes into play in
many shapes and forms. We can perhaps begin by stating the most obvious con-
nection first: translation and interpreting are modes of language work, and the
affective layer of language is the raw material that translators and interpreters pro-
cess on a daily basis. In addition to its propositional content, each utterance also
carries attitude or emotion, conveyed with either lexical and grammatical means
or paralinguistically, for example, with intonation or capital letters and emoticons.
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

If affect is an essential element of language, it is easy to argue that affects and affect
modulation also play a role in all writing, reading and, therefore doubly so, in
translating (Davou 2007). In translation, elements such as politeness strategies,
hedging, expressions of stance and appraisal, and signals of emotional stage are
interpreted and contrastively analysed, leading to judgements over how best to
convey them or, if necessary, how to modulate them for the new readership with
the help of particular translation strategies. And in the resulting translation, vari-
ous affective elements are deployed, to accomplish the desired outcomes. Natu-
rally, texts do not only contain affects, they often also aim to cause particular kinds
of affects in their readers. Similarly, the translator can and is often expected to
modulate the readers’ affective engagement (see Chapter 3).
The notion of affective labour put forward in this book goes beyond the lin-
guistic level, and beyond the translator’s task of analysing, reproducing or modu-
lating textual affects. As discussed above, affective labour can in fact be seen as a
redundant term, as we can consider all human endeavours through their affective
valence. However, with regard to some activities, affective aspects are more pro-
nounced, and expectations for particular affective stances or emotional perfor-
mances are more explicit and durable than in some others. Some of these durable
affective aspects are particularly “sticky”, to use the term created by Sara Ahmed
already referred to a number of times in Chapter 1. As the objects of emotion
circulate, in this case translation and interpreting, they become “sticky, or satu-
rated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (Ahmed 2014: 11; see also
Ahmed 2010). Ahmed (2014: 44) also emphasizes that we are not always aware of
how we feel, and that repression plays a significant role in making objects sticky
and making an affect stick to them.5 Translating and interpreting, although argu-
ably the written and oral forms of the same activity, are curiously antagonistic
in terms of the affective expectations placed on them and the affects that stick
to them. In interpreting, normative expectations of professional conduct centre
around the concept of neutrality. In translation, the parallel term has tradition-
ally been fidelity, and this variation in central terminology for ethical conduct has
valorized the two interlinked professional spheres differently. The role of affective
capital and the expectations for affectively acceptable performances in interpret-
ing will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5; in the following, I take a brief look at
the history of sticky affects on translation.

. I will return to this deep psychological argument of unconscious affects briefly in Chapter
8, through Jung’s concept of shadow work.
 Translation and Affect

2.2 Love as a sticky affect in translation

Allured by the readily available allusions to sexual relationships in defining trans-

lation practice, commentators have resorted to numerous related metaphors, typi-
cally gendering translation as the feminine and the source text as the masculine
partner and discussing translation in terms of prostitutes and pimps (Robinson),
breaking the hymen (Derrida), violent penetration (Steiner), or giving birth
(Schleiermacher), and then setting boundaries to acceptable behaviour. Perhaps
the best known and most long-lived adage is the notion of les belles infideles, the
idea of the beautiful translation always being an unfaithful one. It was originally
coined to deride the free translation style prevalent in 17th- and 18th-century
France, and it is built on the idea that translations, like women, can either be pretty
or faithful, but not both. Even in today’s parlance this idea is often evoked, typi-
cally to signal that we may need to accept some ugliness in translation in order to
get a faithful re-rendering of the original. Lori Chamberlein’s article from 1988
provides a powerful overview of this discourse that tends to establish a hierarchy
in which translation and the translator are subservient to the original and a set of
accepted affective responses to this hierarchy.
In the 1990s, feminist translation scholars hijacked this patriarchal and often
misogynist imagery for their own purposes. For example, Susanne de Lotbinière-
Harwood (1991) turned the French adage on its head by adding a prefix and
calling her own translation practice rebelliously as “re-belle and infidèle”. In the
same year, Luise von Flotow (1991: 82) praised Lotbinière-Harwood’s hijacking
translation practices and put forth an agenda that would make changes to “the
habitual ‘missionary’ position assigned to translation”. While the rhetoric of the
second-wave feminist translators was belligerent, their actual practices were often
quite amicable in the sense of translations produced in perfect understanding of
likeminded authors. Publications describing the Canadian context, in particular,
tell a continued story of a closely-knit collectivity, and while the texts were mov-
ing across languages (between French and English), the socio-cultural distance
between the author and translator was not very long. In contrast, the translational
relationship between radically different realities that Gayatri Spivak depicts in her
early and influential text “Politics of Translation” speaks of intense intimacy and
passion between the translator and the text but also of the loss of identity and the
limits of fully understanding a foreign reality:
To surrender in translation is more erotic than ethical. In that situation the good-
willing attitude “she is just like me” is not very helpful. In so far as Michele Barrett
is not like Gayatri Spivak, their friendship is more effective as a translation. In
order to earn that right of friendship or surrender of identity, of knowing that the
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

rhetoric of the text indicates the limits of language for you as long as you are with
the text, you have to be in a different relationship with the language, not even only
with the specific text. (Spivak 1993: 183)

While notions of love and friendship have lived on in the discourses of translators,
many modern translation scholars have tended to either steer away from such state-
ments or regard them as misguided – indeed, among my own early publications was
a passionate (sic!) column in a university magazine against the idea of seeing trans-
lation as a labour of love (Koskinen 1995). Translation research in the 21st century
has also moved away from an essayistic style, and to other kinds of questions. With
hindsight, I now think that centuries of analytical thinking of translation in terms of
relationships is indeed worth listening to if one wants to understand how and why
particular affects stick, regardless of whether you agree with the imagery chosen to
describe it. First, the long history of normative statements about fidelity testifies to
a fear of translators not being so, and this fear or worry is clearly the driving force
behind normative calls for neutral and faithful rendering. The translator as traitor
is another recurrent imagery, and a source of drama in many fictional depictions
of translators and interpreters (Kaindl & Spitzl 2014). Interestingly, in her analysis
of such fictional works authored by translators themselves, Jean Anderson (2005)
uncovers a wealth of portrayals of a marginalized professional group whose mem-
bers can be seen as treasonous and transgressive. Linking these narratives directly
to the affects involved in literary translation, she depicts a number of ailments from
feelings of displacement and loss of identity to a nagging sense of derivativeness.
Indeed, we can hypothesize that through fiction these translators are able to tap
into and process the dark side of their vocation, working on its shadowy elements.
It is no wonder that authors may wish to be loved, or at least not hated and
betrayed by their translators. The idea of the translator and author as lovers, friends
or soul mates also provides an image of translation that translators themselves may
find pleasing. However, it is also necessary to ask, “why is it assumed to be better to
do the same thing if it is done out of love?” (Ahmed 2014: 124). Love, if anything, is
a sticky affect with extensive cultural conditioning, and the argument is therefore
hard to resist. The idea of loving translation also resonates with the current cul-
tural climate where knowledge workers are expected to love their work (and hence
to accept precarious conditions or low pay) (Tokumitsu 2015). Dedicating one’s
time and effort to a text one utterly dislikes or fundamentally disagrees with, or to
a client one does not see eye to eye with, is emotionally taxing. Although one rarely
encounters translators ranting about these matters in public, backstage venting
among colleagues is a well-known pressure valve. In contrast, a sense of unison
and intimacy can indeed be quite rewarding, be it a translation of a literary work
you value or the production of documentation needed for a cause you believe in.
 Translation and Affect

The advice to choose your authors, given by Wentworth Dillon, the 4th Earl of
Roscommon, known for his blank verse translation of the Ars Poetica (1680), may
therefore make sense even today:

Examine how your Humour is inclin’d

And which the Ruling Passion of your Mind;
Then seek a Poet who your way does bend,
and chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend;
United by this Sympathetick Bond,
you grow familiar, intimate and fond;
your Thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,
no longer his Interpreter but He. (Dillon 1684 in Reynolds 2011: 127)

Again, my earlier attitude to this poem has been quite negative, focusing on the
last line of this stanza which I saw as an anti-empowering demand for the transla-
tor to diminish themselves to portray someone else. Reanalysing it through an
explicitly affective reading, I now interpret the poem as much more benign to
translators. In fact, in Dillon’s world of men not “compelled by Want to prostitute
their pen” as another line of the poem goes, the poet–author is the less agentic
party, waiting to become selected. The first two lines repeat an argument I make in
Chapter 8: in order not to be swayed by the sticky affects one needs to develop self-
awareness and abilities for listening to one’s own affective and embodied reactions.
Even the last line can equally well be interpreted as the author being subsumed
by the translator through intimacy, familiarity and fondness, or seen as a psycho-
analytical process of identification (Ahmed 2014: 126). The idea of the source text
(author) and the translation (translator) being tied together through a bond of
love also resonates with a fear of loss and a prospect of grief: “love announces itself
most passionately when faced with the loss of the object” (ibid.: 130).
The idea of the sympathetic bond was born in and from the developing
Romantic spirit of divinely inspired authorship, but, similar to gendered imagery,
it has lived on in translation theory and in the minds of those involved in liter-
ary translation. The translator and translation scholar Lawrence Venuti took issue
with this mind-set, re-labelled as simpatico, in his influential book on translators’
invisibility (Venuti 1995: 273–306). After quoting the same fragment of Dillon’s
poem as I did above, he gives an anecdote of the early days of his own career as
a translator of poetry, recounting the advice he was given by a senior colleague
who effectively repeated the advice on a sympathetic bond, but with an additional
twist of finding a poet who is your contemporary so that your translation career
can develop side by side with your author’s. In his typical style of refraining from
straight-forward statements, Venuti explores the potential and the limits of the
idea of merging the identity of the translator with that of the author, coming to
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

a conclusion that the whole notion of simpatico is an illusion, produced with the
help of Venuti’s pet enemy, the fluent translation strategy:
Most crucially, [simpatico] conceals the fact that in order to produce the effect
of transparency in a translated text, in order to give the reader the sense that the
text is a window onto the author, translators must manipulate what often seems
to be a very resistant material, i.e., the language in which they are translating.
… Transparency occurs only when the translation reads fluently, when there are
no awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings, when
clear syntactical connections and consistent pronouns create intelligibility to the
reader. … These formal techniques [of poetry translation] reveal that transpar-
ency is an illusionistic effect: it depends on the translator’s work with language,
but hides this work, even the very presence of language, by suggesting that the
author can be seen in translation, that in it the author speaks in his or her own
voice.(Venuti 1995: 286–287)

Venuti goes on to explain how his own English translation of the Italian poems by
Milo De Angelis betrays the target culture expectations of fluency and transpar-
ency, but that only in so doing it is able to achieve fidelity to the source text, if only
in an abusive manner, through excess and supplementarity. These, in turn, are
not too alien to the speculative poetry in question. In a way, the simpatico model
he just renounced because of the attached values of fluency and transparency
now returns through another, more resistant and hence more desired translation
strategy. In her reassessment and rehabilitation of the concept of simpatico, Anna
Strowe (2011: 55) defines it as “a perceived affinity between translator and author
– be it personal, emotional, or stylistic – that is created, reinforced or manipulated
by the translator.” In my reading of the simpatico critique, Venuti the translator-
cum-theorist is in fact doing just that: starting from personal affinity, he moves on
to creating and reinforcing stylistic and, I’d like to argue, also emotional affinity.
He is not denouncing the idea of loving your author; he is simply criticizing a
particular translation strategy and proposing a rougher kind of love. I let Leonard
Cohen (I’m your man, 1988) summarize:
If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you.

Indeed, a mask is what is needed for professional performance. Neutral media-

tion, the goal of fluent strategies and the ethical requirement posed to translators
and interpreters alike, is not a given; it is performed, and achieved through active
engagement in affective labour by all participants in interaction. According to
Anthony Pym (2012: 80–81), the professional role of the interpreter or translator
 Translation and Affect

is like a mask, creating trust and providing a shelter underneath which the inter-
preter or translator can complete the task.
It is good to remember that not only the interpreter but also the translator
puts on a mask in the sense of giving her voice to the other, and also the translator’s
“I” belongs to the author (and the translator’s own voice, if needed to be heard, is
conventionally marked out as a separate translator’s note). In translation, the mask
is mainly produced via verbal means, and fluent, non-estranging translation strat-
egies are a core method for translators to put on a mask of professional neutrality.
Non-fluency, in turn, poses a risk to either professionality (the risk of appearing
incompetent) or neutrality (too much visibility drawn to the translator). In inter-
preting, the mask is worn in a more bodily manner. Similar to translation, fluent
delivery devoid of an unwanted accent is one element of the interpreter’s mask as
well, but especially in face-to-face interpreting modes, the mask is also produced
through gestures and mimics, or rather by way of not displaying them, and by
displaying professional conduct through the outer habitus, in terms of clothing,
posture and behaviour (see Chapter 5).
Translation studies has tended to emphasize the bridge-building qualities of
translational activities, and many scholars have openly advocated for the empow-
erment of translating agents. The affective emphasis placed on either being friendly
and loving towards your author and the more than mildly contradictory desire for
being perceived as a neutral middleman can also be understood as a mirror image
of the sticky fear of not being, or appearing to be, so. Much as we in the field may
dislike the traduttore, traditore adages that draw attention to the risk of treason
in translation, we may still need to accept the potential of failure in translation
as an important element of our disciplinary self-understanding. The discourses
of sympathy and love, and the practices of putting on masks, may well have their
origin in the fear of ill treatment from the part of those being translated, but they
also bear traces of translators’ darker affects and shadows: the anxiety of potential
embarrassment, shame or guilt over not managing to be amicable or fair in one’s
re-rendering, of being caught not succeeding (see Chapter 4). The same phenom-
enon may also have a role in translators’ notoriously apologetic style in writing
prefaces, discursively anticipating criticism even when it has not (yet) been voiced
(Robinson 1991: xii). The affective commandment to build trust, through cultivat-
ing sympathy or disinterestedness, can be seen as the core affective task underlin-
ing all other layers of translatorial affective labour (Chesterman 2016: 178).

2.3 Affects and network economy

Traditional notions about the task of the translator, and the affects involved,
tend to have a bipolar focus on either the author and the translator, or the source
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

text and the translation. This line of argument is also visible in the above discus-
sion. These two protagonists (with or without an explicit addition of a reader
figure) are not, however, the only actors in a translation process. Translating and
interpreting are professional activities performed in teams. The contemporary,
networked translation industry provides constellations of mutual dependence
where translators, project managers, revisers, terminologists and IT people and
other parties are in constant, albeit often virtual and indirect, contact. The com-
municative situations entail multiprofessional expertise, and translators and
interpreters need to bring their professional mediational competences to the
common table and secure a firm footing among other experts. These networks
of relations provide a second layer of affective labour, tangential but not directly
derived from the contents of the translatorial task at hand. An early contribution
to the emerging field of translatorial workplace studies was Hanna Risku’s book
on translation project management in 2004. It did not quite make the waves in
translation studies it should have (it was also a pioneering work on ethnography
in translation studies), but the findings – that project management is all about
the management of people – brought into the limelight a special trait of the then
emerging new translatorial profession, the specificities of which are not neces-
sarily always appreciated. Project managers surely engage in affective labour as
they balance between the hopes and demands of clients and service providers
while negotiating a tight financial line: “Managing someone else’s formerly man-
aged frustration and anger is itself a job that takes emotional labor” (Hochschild
1983/2003: 118).
Managing, modulating and manipulating affects is indeed hard work, and the
multiprofessional playgrounds, network economy, technological advances and
tightening financial constraints are a constant source of negative affects in the
current translational landscape. The creation of the translation industry from the
1990s onwards is a powerful example of the restructuring of a professional field
through the creation of a service culture and information economy Hardt (1999)
discusses, and the current networked business model has created new sticky affects
around translation. Rather than expecting love or fearing betrayal in a manner still
prevalent in the context of literary translation, the business transaction partners of
the current world of language service provision focus on capitalizable traits such
as loyalty, commitment and malleability. The research by Kristiina Abdallah has
significantly advanced our disciplinary understanding of the affective economy of
translation production networks. In an article on agency theory (2010), she looks
at some of their prevalent shortcomings, such as information asymmetry, adverse
selection and goal conflicts, and the resulting asymmetries of commitment and
moral hazards. Abdallah emphasizes that agency is always emotionally generated.
Referring to the Australian sociologist Jack Barbalet (1996), she provides a list
of emotions that contribute to agency: (1) confidence to act on behalf of self, (2)
 Translation and Affect

trust, that is, the feeling of acting together with others, and (3) loyalty, that is, the
feeling of acting on behalf of an institution (Abdallah 2010: 29).
Trust and loyalty are affects that have a long history of sticking with transla-
toriality, and they are also common concepts in translation studies; confidence to
act, in turn, is a logical component of agency. In a network economy, all of these
may suffer, leading to ethical stress, lack of motivation and loss of self-respect.
With the help of interview data, Abdallah (2010: 29–30) identifies how transla-
tors manage “without being able to trust the intermediary principals and without
being able to feel loyalty towards the production network they have been part of,
and how, as a consequence, they have developed various coping strategies in order
to retain their sense of agency.” Coping strategies such as neck-saving through
documentation, tit-for-tat retaliation to protect the self, rationalizing unethical
behaviour, and, in extreme cases, exit from the network (cf. Abdallah & Koskinen
2007) are all humanly understandable although not necessarily optimal for the
individual or healthy for the network in question (see also Section 6.2.1). It is of
course the task of those responsible for the network to make sure that the con-
ditions do not encourage opportunistic behaviour and lead to unwanted coping
strategies among participants.
Since translating and interpreting networks are typically hierarchical, and
translators and interpreters often in a peripheral position with limited negotia-
tion power, their best options may well be to first be careful about choosing which
networks they wish to join and, second, to cultivate emotion regulation skills and
develop a wide arsenal of healthy coping strategies. This necessity has also led
some scholars to hypothesize that recruiters might do well in trying to select stu-
dents according to their emotional traits, and that emotional stability and low lev-
els of negative affectivity might help students develop better coping strategies and
abilities to alleviate stress and anxiety (Bontempo & Napier 2014).
Séverine Hubscher-Davidson devotes one chapter (2018, Chapter 3) to emo-
tion regulation and discusses the emotional labour involved (ibid.: 122–127). She
focuses on two opposing coping strategies that individuals have when faced with
emotionally taxing situations and a consequent need to down-regulate their emo-
tional engagement: suppression and reappraisal. Suppression concerns a modu-
lation of response, a decrease in expressing felt emotions (ibid.: 109), whereas
reappraisal refers to a cognitive process of reassessing what goes on to reduce the
intensity of the negative feelings (ibid.: 110). Suppression has not fared well in
empirical research: it has been found to lead to problems such as reduced cogni-
tive functioning (impaired memory is a particularly relevant risk for interpreting),
feelings of inauthenticity and deteriorating social relations. Reappraisal, in turn,
has been found to improve well-being (ibid.: 110). I am tempted to also link it to
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

empathy and the ability to change perspectives, skills that help translators and
interpreters in their mediation task (see also Chapter 8).
As the above examples also indicate, workplace studies (and this may well
be true of psychological emotion regulation literature as well) have perhaps had
a tendency to emphasize negative affects and the necessity to control and down-
regulate negative emotions. It is good to remember that work also gives us a multi-
tude of positive affects, and translators do indeed love many aspects of their work
(Koskinen 2014b; Dam & Zethsen 2016; see Chapter 4 on the ups and downs of
translation). It may also be that some professionals excel in up-regulating positive
emotions in translating and interpreting, for example, by using engagement strate-
gies. Sometimes it may also be wise to up-regulate negative emotions, for example,
when entering a new network that raises doubts, as up-regulating anxieties may
support navigation in a terrain expected to cause difficulties.
Managing up- and down-regulation is easier said than done. The emotional
compass, for most of us, is not optimally calibrated. We may over-react to minor
matters and overlook significant issues. This is where the corporeal side of affect
may bring additional viewpoints. One significant difference between affect theo-
ries and other research agendas is that a focus on affect brings bodily aspects into
the sphere of analytic attention. An increased focus on corporeality also allows
us to theorize about translating and interpreting from a post-human perspective,
discussing translators as cyborgs, the translator’s body as non-bounded and mesh-
ing with technology, for example, by seeing translation memory tools as a case of
extended cognition. As new forms of organizing translatorial labour emerge, it is
also becoming ever more important to look at issues of ergonomics from the point
of view of the limits of the body and of corporeal fatigue caused by unhealthy
working conditions, for example, in the context of digitalized translating and
interpreting platforms, many of which transform translatorial work into poorly
paid microtasks, and translators and interpreters into task rabbits hanging around
waiting for the next microgig and competing to be the fastest bidder.
Each subfield of translating and interpreting has its own peculiarities, and the
exact forms of affective economies vary, but the current business models that place
most practitioners in the position of a self-employed entrepreneur encourage the
transformation of affective capital flexibly into economic capital since forms of
affective capital such as the ability to please the client, to appear trustworthy and
reliable, or to keep one’s foreignness in control will make it more likely for the
customer to return. This Foucauldian idea of the entrepreneurship of the self has
been identified as a current societal megatrend, supported by the shifting employ-
ment structures (Foucault 2008; Lahikainen & Harni 2016: 26–27). In today’s
world, this line of thinking argues, we are expected to think of ourselves and of
 Translation and Affect

our bodies through the concept of capital and to make our bodies and lives into
businesses that we shape and mould to meet the needs and expectations of the
prospective clients. In this kind of an economic climate, multilingual proficiency,
performances of cultural authenticity, intercultural competences – and the affec-
tive labour involved in all of these – can be and is converted into economic capital.
The new affective economy has brought along new sticky affects that are gener-
ated by the business model and network roles more than the translatorial tasks at
hand. The issues of choosing your author lovingly and being loyal to the source
text have given way to affective issues such as choosing your network cunningly,
not being a sucker for working for too low fees and respecting the confidentiality
requirements of NDA clauses. “What sticks?” is a question Sara Ahmed poses in
her book (2014: 11), asking why social transformation is so difficult to achieve.
The affective shift with regard to translation is worth noting; the changed emo-
tional intensities are a powerful signal of a radical restructuring of the practice.
Attention to affects and the ways in which they stick, providing readily available
scripts for everyone involved, and also the ways in which they may become less
sticky in time, allows us to understand the stability and changeability of the social
organization of practices:
This analysis of how we ‘feel our way’ approaches emotion as a form of cultural
politics or world making. My argument about the cultural politics of emotions is
developed not only as a critique of the psychologising and privatisation of emo-
tions, but also as a critique of a model of social structure that neglects the emo-
tional intensities, which allow social structures to be reified as forms of being.
Attention to emotions allows us to address the question of how subjects become
invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living
death.(Ahmed 2014: 12)

Words and affects move, stick and slide, and “we move, stick and slide with them”
(Ahmed 2014: 14). Culturally powerful affects are sticky, and we get attached to
particular objects through them. Even when we wish to challenge our affiliations
and investments, we may find ourselves stuck. But transformations are also possi-
ble, as the shifting affective setups of translation indicate: “There is hope, of course,
as things can get unstuck” (ibid.: 16). One way of getting things unstuck is through
affective labour. The view presented by Hochschild is largely strategic, and the
emerging picture of affective labour calculative and manipulative, but it can also
be seen differently, in a more transformative light: in addition to the performative
side of displaying the kinds of affects a particular occupation requires, affective
labour can also be understood as working towards understanding and regulating
one’s own affective responses in various situations. Through this kind of affec-
tive labour, one could become more reflexive and more self-aware and analytically
 Chapter 2. Affective labour and sticky affects 

observe the prevalent cultural and affective conditionings around translating and
interpreting as social practices, become better able to recognize the kinds of nega-
tive forces that unconsciously work against the professions and more attuned to
subtle changes in affective economies and therefore better able to adapt to chang-
ing situations and to be part of those changes.
 chapter 3

Appraising and modulating affective

valence in translation

“Thinking, writing and reading are integral to our capacities to affect and to be
affected.” This quotation from Elspeth Probyn (2010: 77) emphasizes the role of
written language in our interaction with each other and the world, and summa-
rizes the focus of this chapter, which looks at the role of affectivity in translation as
reading and writing (and thinking). Probyn builds on a duet between writers and
readers, developing a vision of affect as an interpersonal force, a force that is able
to affect. In the case of translation, of course, this duet is broken into two parts,
as the translator enters the scene first as a reader attuning herself to the written
text in one language and then as a writer matching and modulating the affects
she interpreted and experienced into a new text in another language. This chap-
ter is divided into three sections that follow the logic of a linear translation pro-
cess: Section 3.1 discusses text analysis from the perspective of appraising affects,
­Section 3.2 explores the issue of translation strategies from the point of view of
affective modulation, and in Section 3.3 the affective undercurrents of reception
are discussed.
Primary affects are, according to the definition by Silvain Tomkins discussed
in Chapter 1, innate and non-conscious. But cultural, social and personal concep-
tions of acceptability, preference and desired effects make us (attempt to) control
and regulate both whether and to what extent we allow particular affects (feelings
and emotions in Tomkins’ vocabulary) to surface in our cognition and behaviour,
and what kinds of affects we try to induce in others. Affect regulation is in fact a
central aspect of child development, socialization and acculturation (see Fonagy
et al. 2004: 92–96). Languages are the main medium for humans to communicate
their inner thoughts, feelings and beliefs to others and also to affect the thoughts,
feelings and beliefs of others. It is thus not particularly surprising that affects and
their appraisal and modulation can also be seen to occupy a central role in the
production and reception of texts. The entire fields of semantics and pragmatics
can be seen to be largely devoted to issues falling into this category, and much
of translation studies, in turn, explores the limits and possibilities of their cross-
cultural transfer. I will largely bypass this vast area of linguistic research here; not
 Translation and Affect

because I do not value what it has to offer but to make room for other aspects less
often discussed but equally fundamental to translating and interpreting: social
and affective practices. This decision also rests on my firm belief that in cur-
rent translation pedagogy and translation research, questions such as register,
politeness strategies or semantic prosody, and their cross-cultural differences, are
well-covered, and need not be rehearsed here (for an overview see, e.g., Malm-
kjær 2005). What I aim to provide instead is an overarching affective perspective
on translatorial decision-making involved in choosing between alternatives with
varying affective valence.

3.1 Appraising affects

In the psychological study of emotions, affective valence refers to the intrin-

sic value of a feeling on the scale of positive (e.g., joy) versus negative valence
(e.g., sorrow).6 Similarly, situations, materials and everyday objects have valence
(­Lebrecht et al. 2012). The study of assigning affective value to mental concepts
and “attitude objects” has a long tradition. Thus, certain persons, places, words or
things are associated with a particular attitude; for example, prison has a strong
negative valence and fiancé a positive one. Lebrecht et al. expand the notion of
valence to all objects and suggest that although valence can sometimes be very
subtle and near-neutral, even this “microvalence” is still automatically perceived
and incorporated into our mental representations of objects, together with a mul-
titude of other kinds of information such as contextual experience, semantic and
conceptual knowledge and memories. These spontaneous associations feed into
what becomes the microvalence of the perceived object. To an extent, this infor-
mation is subjective and situational, but Lebrecht et al. also report on findings
that are quite consistent within and across respondents indicating that valence
is not assigned randomly and that it is not entirely individualistic. In addition to
learned associations that the researchers call “high-level” ones, positive or nega-
tive valence is also affected by “low-level” perceptual features of the object, such
as shape, colour, material or functionalities. All this links affective valence to both
aesthetics and preference.
Lebrecht et al. (2012) focus on the visual perception of everyday objects.
In this chapter, the same thinking is applied to texts. Like everyday objects, all

. It needs to be emphasized that this balancing and comparison of valences is to be under-

stood in the psychological sense of the term, not in the linguistic meaning of valence.
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

textual products (texts, words, concepts, genres) have a more or less subtle valence
to us, and this valence feeds into how we perceive texts. Similar to the tendency
in psychology to focus on strongly-valenced objects (a bloody weapon is used as
an example by Lebrecht et al., while a coffee mug is an example of more subtle
valence), research in translation studies has largely focused on situations with
strong valence. These include textual elements with strong positive valence such
as humour or wordplay (e.g., Chiaro 2010), and those with strong negative valence
such as taboos (Robinson 1996) and censorship (Merkle 2010). In a similar vein,
error elimination and revision research and translation quality assessment litera-
ture can be interpreted as attempts to eliminate mistranslations and mistakes, that
is, the elements of translation that have a strong negative valence. The relevance of
all these high-valence and high-risk issues is intuitively easy to appreciate, and I
have no desire to challenge that. Still, the main function of this chapter is to make
the case for also appreciating the processes of appraisal and modulation of textual
elements that are closer to the middle ground of the valence scale.
Lebrecht et al. (2012: 4) emphasize the role of microvalence in optimizing
our ability to make decisions in our everyday life. Many of these myriads of deci-
sions are fully or largely unconscious, and microvalence supports the processes of
judgement and choice involved. Lebrecht et al. (ibid.) conclude:
[W]e contend that our perception of the world is always colored by our expe-
riences and predispositions. We are social creatures that, through a variety of
contextual experiences, create a visual world animated with affect. As observers
we must decode the multitude of perceptual, affective, and semantic information
presented to our senses. To solve the affect part of this equation we evaluate the
valence of all visual objects across the scene. Much in the same way that we auto-
matically perceive the shape, size, or color of objects, we cannot help but perceive
the valence in objects. In this sense, valence is not a label applied after the fact to
perceptual entities, but rather is an intrinsic element of visual perception with the
same mental status as other object properties.

Affects, as we know from our everyday experiences, can be contagious: both

positive and negative affects tend to spread easily across populations. In transla-
tion, as in writing and reading in general, affects are transmitted textually, and
the source text author, translation client and the translator alike have their aims
and hopes regarding the affective aspects of the reception. The capacity to affect,
this chapter argues, depends on skills in modulating texts and their affective ele-
ments in appropriate ways. This is where affective valence comes into play. Affec-
tive valences inform all textual activities of a translation event from source text
production through source text analysis to the translation process, including both
subconscious choices and strategic decision-making, and finally to the reception
 Translation and Affect

of the translation. Importantly, the decision to translate and the choice of the tar-
get language(s) are also affective: the availability (or not) of texts in a language you
feel affinity towards and have access to is in itself significant on an emotional level,
in feelings of inclusion or exclusion, and in identity formation, in terms of belong-
ing and of ancestries that are either being recognized or not.

3.1.1 Affective valence and appraisal

Any translator is first a reader of a text, and typically (self-translation notwith-
standing) that text was produced by someone other than the translator and
comes to the translator’s desk through some mediating parties. The idea of a
writer actively shaping the affective properties of the text is not new. Its long
history goes back to Aristotelian rhetoric and the art of ethos and pathos and
runs through centuries of comparative stylistics and intercultural pragmatics to
genre studies as well as literary and linguistic theories of representing and com-
municating emotion. Political discourse is a prime example of the modulation of
affect, propaganda and agitation being extreme cases of processes that are used
by all writers to different degrees and more or less consciously with the aim of
securing the desired outcome. It follows that to be able to make informed deci-
sions about suitable translation strategies and appropriate equivalent expressions,
the translator needs to get attuned to the affective elements in the source text
and the motivations behind them, and also to assess how these will be received
in the new context of use. This has long been known in translation studies. As
discussed in Chapter 2, Gideon Toury’s (2012) classic division between adequacy
and acceptability, for example, is fundamentally an affective categorization, and
acceptability is a judgement of whether the applied translation solutions carry a
socially acceptable affective valence.
Still, affect and affective valence are not among the most commonly used
vocabulary in translation classrooms and workplaces. We much more often talk
about other issues such as semantic accuracy, the skopos and function of the text,
cultural norms and culture-specific expectations. Affect-based reasoning such
as “this does not sound right” or “I just like this solution better” is likely to be
perceived as wishy-washy, non-scientific and non-professional. The discourse,
unanalytical as it may be, signals the importance of affects in translatorial deci-
sion-making. Translatorial gut reactions (Robinson 1991), tasting the different
options and translating by ear are all evidence of the embodied affectivity of trans-
lation. This discourse also signals the need to develop more analytical vocabulary
and methods for analysing and describing affective elements in texts.
One approach that offers a comprehensive framework for analysing the
affective strategies used by writers is appraisal theory. In the next section I will
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

demonstrate its usability in source text analysis for translation. Appraisal theory is
a tool developed by two Australian genre researchers, Peter Martin and Jim White
(2005), to examine the interpersonal features between writers and readers in texts
written in English and the ways in which the writers are present in their texts. It
provides a systematic way of attuning to the ways in which the author demon-
strates approval or reproach, excitement or ennui, and gives praise or blame. It
also allows us to examine how the writers position themselves with respect to the
readers and what kind of intended reader or ideal readers they construct (Martin
& White 2005: 1). Martin and White explicitly link their approach to Hallidayan
systemic-functional linguistics. Appraisal theory can be seen as a fine-tuned and
multi-directional application for analysing the interpersonal layer and tenor of
texts (ibid: 33; see also Koskinen 2008: Chapter 6).

3.1.2 Appraisal theory in text analysis

To demonstrate the use of appraisal theory, in this section I will analyse a blog
entry drawn from an institutional setting.7 The genre has been intentionally
selected to highlight affective elements, but my argument extends to all kinds
of texts, with different degrees of affective valence. My approach here is data-
driven, and theoretical elements are brought into play only to the extent that they
are deemed relevant for the text at hand. An interested reader is advised to also
go back to the original source (Martin & White 2005) for a fuller account of
the appraisal framework. The blog post under observation here represents insti-
tutional communication, a longstanding interest of mine. More specifically, we
will look at an example of implementing the European Commission communica-
tion strategy at a time when the institution was responding to new requirements
and opportunities for more dialogic interaction with various constituencies cre-
ated by advanced technology (the transition to what is called Web 2.0), as it also
needed to enhance its PR activities in order to win the hearts and minds of the
Europeans after a challenging enlargement period (Koskinen 2008, Chapter 4;
Koskinen 2010a). The cabinet, lead by José Manuel Barroso (2005–2009), that
took power at the time was exceptionally attuned to language policy, multilin-
gualism and communication issues, and Margot Wallström from Sweden was
appointed as the first European Commissioner for Institutional Relations and
Communication Strategy. In a parliamentary hearing preceding her appointment
to this newly created post, Wallström emphasized the need to create a more dia-
logic and democratic communication strategy. More specifically, she promised to

. A more extensive version of this analysis has been published earlier in Finnish (Koskinen
2014a).
 Translation and Affect

work for reaching out to European citizens, for creating a European public space
and for localizing communication to adapt it to different local contexts (Wall-
ström 2004). She also underlined the importance of talking with people rather
than hierarchically communicating to them from above. In short, she envisioned
a communication strategy that aimed at creating and supporting active and affec-
tive citizenship (Koskinen 2008: 64–66).
To achieve the aims of the policy, the European Commission adopted a
number of new social media practices (see Koskinen 2013), among them blog-
ging. Wallström’s blog was started in January 2005, and she was the first com-
missioner to blog; others (or in practice, their PR teams) followed suit so that by
the end of their period, ten members of the cabinet had some kind of blog pres-
ence. Below, I will take Wallström’s very first blog post (13 January 2005) under
scrutiny (see F­ igure 1). The new communication policy of democracy, dialogue
and debate (what was called Plan D; European Commission 2005) that the blog
needs to be seen as a tool for, foregrounded affectivity. Across time, this has been
typical of political texts, of course (Protevi 2009), but it had been less common
for administrative organizations and bureaucratic texts. The Web 2.0 world has
changed this for many public institutions, also beyond the European context, and
explicitly affective forms of communication have become mainstream, especially
in social media platforms in which these institutions have become active. Insti-
tutional translation has always struggled to balance reader-orientedness with the
combined weight of legalese, terminological consistency and administrative tradi-
tions, and it has often been a losing battle for readability (Koskinen 2008). With
CAT tools and now machine translation solutions, the balance between institu-
tionalization and readability is becoming even harder to achieve, but at the same
time there is new and increased pressure to turn the tables. In addition to issues
of readability and accessibility, also questions of affect need to be brought into the
picture more dominantly than before.
This is where appraisal theory and other approaches attuned to the emotive
and affective elements in texts and communication can assist. In appraisal the-
ory, the focus of attention is traditionally on how affects are communicated and
mediated. In political texts and by extension in institutional blogging, such as
Wallström’s post in question, the viewpoint needs to be changed to also empha-
size the production of affects, that is, the linguistic elements and microstrategies
utilized to achieve higher-level political goals. Considering the explicit com-
munication policy, and the role of the first blog entry, posted less than two
weeks into the term and as the first major opening in putting the policy into
practice, it makes sense to analyse the entry, and the blog infrastructure around
it, from the perspectives of talking with people rather than to them, and of
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

c­ reating a feeling of dialogic interaction and positing an affective and active

role to the readers.
The blog is a computer-mediated genre, defined and delimited by the available
technological affordances. Among inherent features of blogs are: chronology and
the idea of a continuous flow of new updates, dated entries and contemporaneity,
links between blogs and the blogosphere created by them, possibilities for interac-
tion with commentators, and the potential global reach created by an on-line pres-
ence (publicity is a prototypical feature, although blogs can also be private). Some
genre characteristics, however, are not technology-driven. Among them are the
centrality of text (as opposed to sound or image), the dominant role of the writer
in both creating personalized expression and in controlling the content and the
interaction with others as well as the need to adjust and ration the degree of inti-
macy. No wonder blogging has also been defined as self-expression and identity
work (Miller & Shepherd 2004) – in the context of this book we might also call it
affective labour.
Although blogs were first interpreted as a digital form of the personal diary
(e.g., McNeill 2005), they were soon adopted for business communication pur-
poses as well, making the label of affective labour even more pertinent. Beyond
personal use, blogs and other social media tools are adopted to create more affec-
tive ties with consumers or constituencies, and the blogger is not only managing
their own personality and intimacy levels but doing this professionally for cus-
tomer-relations management and brand maintenance.
Among social media genres, blogging is less interactive and more author-
centred than most. Its inherent non-democratic nature is particularly well suited
for institutional contexts as the author controls the topic and the points raised
and is able to delimit and moderate others’ commenting. In spite of its apparent
dialogism, blogging therefore allows the institutional author to maintain the “star
player role” identified as a feature of institutional communication (Koskinen 2008:
144) and keep other participants on the sidelines. The comment function is there-
fore a two-edged sword: it opens up possibilities for dialogue and interaction but
diminishes institutional control over that interaction. Moderation is needed, but
excessive moderation is easily seen in a negative light.
At the same time, however, genre expectations call for the creation of affin-
ity by humanizing and personalizing content also in institutional blogging, espe-
cially when the blog is designated to a named individual (Wyld 2007). This was
the case with Wallström’s blog, which was very clearly signalled as her personal
communication tool, and in a number of posts she also provided motivations for
her blogging and expressed her personal enjoyment in writing them. The blog was
regularly updated, and 265 entries had been posted by December 2009 when the
 Translation and Affect

blog was discontinued as the term of the Barroso cabinet ended. An impressive-
sounding 3.3 million visitors were reported to have found the site during 2005–
2009. The blog is still fully available in an archived form.8
The very first blog post, dated 1 January 2005 (see Figure 1), is a logical object
of analysis because of its crucial position. It was the beginning of term for the cabi-
net and for the commissioner, and the launch of a new communicative tool was in
line with the goals of the new communication policy. It is reasonable to assume that
in this particular entry, the topics, the register, the tone of voice and interactive ele-
ments with readers were carefully considered and intentional. The title “Tsunami,
Barroso Commission, Fado music” shows an intention to meet genre expectations
of both contemporaneity (tsunami) and confessionalism (personal preference to
Portuguese fado). The first three paragraphs deal with the tragic tsunami in Asia
at the end of 2004. EU-related items are located in the middle part of both the title
and the text itself, and they are treated lightly and from a human-interest point of
view. Shifts between public and private appear somewhat accidental and associa-
tive. For example, in the following extract, the line of thought seems to ramble
from the heaviness of EU work to a mundane thought of gaining weight.: “The
new constitution for Europe is another heavy task awaiting” … “Have you put on
weight during the Christmas holidays?” (italics added).

Figure 1. Wallström’s first blog post

. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2004-2009/blogs/wallstrom/index.
html [accessed 12.10.2019].
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

Managing interpersonal relations is fundamental for institutions and organiza-

tions to maintain their legitimacy. Appraisal theory provides a framework for
studying how the construction of the roles of writer, reader and other personae is
realized in text-based communication (Martin & White 2005, Chapter 3). It is easy
to see that this construction is a crucial element in Wallström’s blog entry, but it is
not straightforward. The text begins with an inclusive we, but later in the text we is
used to refer first to her family, then the Commission and finally the ministers. The
writer’s I is unexpectedly dominant (10 tokens) and might at first glance appear
to foreground the author excessively. A closer scrutiny, however, reveals that it
is used quite dialogically. Expressions such as I wonder if, I think and I disagree
construe a reader who may not necessarily (need to) agree with the author (ibid.:
104). Expressions that explicitly report the writer’s state of mind (personally, I am
glad) can be seen to even challenge the reader to take a stand (ibid.: 6). In contrast,
totally and of course are used to construe a like-minded reader in the expression I
totally disagree of course! (ibid.: 122). The reader is directly addressed only once,
in the aforementioned question: “Have you put on weight during the Christmas
holidays?” It is followed by Wallström’s emphatic exclamation: I have! The com-
bination of you and I thus functions as a connector between the writer and the
reader, creating a shared and embodied circle of everyday experiences. This kind
of constructed unity is an example of a “we-attitude”, an element of communica-
tion recently identified and labelled by Tytti Suojanen (2018) as a companion to
a more widely known “you-attitude” in business and technical communication.
Interpersonal relations can also be studied from the perspective of the implied
writer/reader, an approach originating in literary studies. The same short extract
was also analysed by Suojanen, Koskinen and Tuominen (2015b: 153–154) with
the aim of bringing to the fore the kinds of presuppositions writers may intention-
ally or inadvertently install in their texts:
Implied readers can be discovered by analyzing a number of features in the text,
such as the ways the reader is being addressed, or presuppositions which reveal
some of the reader’s personal characteristics and the expected level of the reader’s
previous knowledge. As an example, let us take a look at the following short ex-
tract of a blog text: “Have you put on weight during the Christmas holidays? I
have!” (Wallström 2005). In this case, the implied reader comes from a back-
ground where Christmas is celebrated, is affluent enough to have overindulged
over the holidays, has issues with self-image, and is potentially more likely to be
female than male. In addition, the writer has created a sense of familiarity and
lack of distance by referring to supposedly shared experiences and attitudes.

The first blog text contains a number of features that tend to be interpreted as
feminine. The tsunami crisis is addressed through family, relationships and emo-
tions, as well as through an emphasis on friendship between women. EU matters
 Translation and Affect

are dealt in a light and personal, even gossipy, tone, and bureaucratic jargon is
carefully avoided. A large number of personal pronouns (see above) has also been
associated with a feminine writing style (Herring & Paolillo 2006).
The blog text is also explicitly heteroglossic (Martin & White 2005: 93), and
the voices of others alternate with that of Wallström herself. The tsunami section
is told in indirect reported speech of a colleague in its entirety (she says …). Even
Wallström’s concluding statement to that section is attributed to the colleague: “my
friend asks herself: what does it mean to be European?” A less positive voice is
reserved for the former colleague Chris Patton, whose critical view of fado and
cod is established only so that the writer can emphatically oppose it. Martin and
White (2005: 119) discuss this strategy from the perspective of externalising the
negation away from the writer-reader dyad by attaching it to a third party. A het-
eroglossia of sorts can also be identified in the ending 2004 sucked! It is a clear
break away from institutional talk, towards youthful expression. Heteroglossia
could be assumed to support interactivity, but in this text, a surface-level multi-
plicity of voices does not seem to open spaces for numerous viewpoints (see ibid.:
102–108). Somewhat unexpectedly we can conclude that while the explicit I turns
out to be quite dialogic, explicit heteroglossia is used in a manner that does not
invite readers into a dialogue.
Finally, an analysis of vocabulary shows that the text foregrounds emotions
and affects. Paradise, hell, dream, love, eager, sentimental, disaster and absurd
mediate affective states. Another feature that builds affectivity is the saturating
prosody created through a repetition of similar features (Martin & White 2005:
24). A prime example of this can be found in the third paragraph where the lack of
comfort is repeated three times: There is very little comfort … Nature does not offer
any comfort … Not even for the media is there any comfort. … The visible role of
emotions and the strong personal presence of the writer who engages in dialogue
and avoids dominant positions indicate a writing style that deliberately breaks free
from expectations for institutional communication.

3.2 Modulating affects

In the analysis of the blog text in the previous section, the context of translation
was hypothetical. At the time of its writing, the new communication strategy and
the concurrent adoption of social media tools were combined with a slackening
multilingualism policy in the external communication of the European Union
(Koskinen 2013). Similar to most social media accounts during the period in
question (and beyond), Wallström’s blog remained largely English-only, and her
first blog post analysed above has to my knowledge never been translated into any
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

other language. The decision of non-translation is, of course, in itself a significant

affective decision: the questions of who is addressed with which language, who is
excluded and whose identity is endorsed are core issues in any language policy,
and these decisions often remain beyond the translators’ influence. The European
Union, too, with its ambitious policy of official languages but an exceedingly var-
ied linguistic map and a necessity to address local constituencies but also to create
a shared public space, is placed between a rock and a hard place with its translation
policy and practices (Koskinen 2008, Chapter 4).
In more general terms, translating institutional and business blogs is a regu-
lar task for professional translators, and in that sense the scenario is not at all
unrealistic. The necessity of having theoretical and methodological tools for ana-
lysing the interpersonal and affective skopoi of the source texts as well as their
pragmatic features is also quite tangibly relevant in the professional world. The
effects of the shifting technological landscape of translation will be discussed in
more detail in Chapter 7, but it is perhaps relevant for the current topic to reiter-
ate the argument that with advanced automation of routine translation, human
translation work will increasingly migrate from more technical and repetitive
kinds of documents towards an increased dominance of argumentative, persua-
sive and creative texts and contexts, where hitting exactly the right tone and affec-
tive valence cannot be left for the machine to figure out. Blogs are an example of
these kinds of genres.
This chapter is organized in a linear manner, proceeding from text analysis
to translation to reception. In real life, these processes of are more integrated and
overlapping, but for clarity we now approach them one by one. The middle step in
the translation process, then, builds on the source text analysis and on a sounding
of the target context. The matching of source text elements to optimally functional
target-text elements and the necessary adaptations involved in the process due to
linguistic, pragmatic or cultural differences between the receiving contexts are a
standard feature of translation work. In translation studies, a number of typolo-
gies of translation strategies have been produced to map the spectrum of options
translators have, either generally (e.g., Chesterman 2016: 85–113) or with respect
to a particular textual element (e.g., allusions; Leppihalme 1994) (for a review of
strategy models, see Pym 2016). As decision-making has been found to be based
on emotional and visceral responses to an equal degree as on cognitive reasoning,
abilities related to affective responses are a significant resource for the translator.
To make informed decisions, translators either consciously or unconsciously rely
not only on their linguistic expertise and world-knowledge but also on their own
affective responses to the source text and to their different potential translation
solutions, aiming to regulate their own emotions and those of the other partici-
pants (Lehr 2014).
 Translation and Affect

Emotion regulation has been defined as the process by which people influ-
ence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience
and express them (Hofmann 2014). Regulation can be achieved at different phases
of emotion generation: by selecting the situation or by modifying it, by deploying
attention, by modifying our cognitive appraisal and our framing the situation, and
by modulating our response to it (ibid.). In translating, affect regulation can be
defined as a process by which the translator influences which emotions the transla-
tion conveys and triggers, how they are expressed and, as much as the translator can,
how these emotions are experienced. This regulation can be achieved at different
phases and by different means: by selecting a suitable source text, by deploying atten-
tion, by modifying the cognitive appraisal of the translation, by reframing the source
text and by modulating the textual features to affect the translation’s reception.
Research in translation studies has revealed numerous examples of selectiv-
ity. Non-translation, as in the case of the blog post above, is an extreme case. In
a communicative situation where the source text is deemed to cause more harm
than good, it may be decided that it is advantageous not to provide a translation.
A number of reasons may lead to this decision, and they are of course not all
related to emotional regulation. But often they are. In the case of Wallström’s blog
discussed in the previous section, it was most likely seen as a tool for creating a
joint public space since the desire to make us all European citizens at heart was an
explicit affective aim of the policy. This goal would have been seriously hampered
with the creation of too many monolingual social media bubbles.
On a smaller scale, when translators make in-text decisions, omission is a well-
known standard selective strategy at their disposal for dealing with items that are
deemed not to travel well. Omission is linked to censorship and taboo, but because
it is a drastic move, more subtle strategies of modification and modulation are far
more wide-spread forms of sheltering readers from negative affects. This modifying
and modulating impulse is commonly known in translation research through the
concept of shifts. These “small linguistic changes occurring in translation” (Mun-
day 2001: 55) are so commonplace that they have been identified as the most likely
candidate for a universal feature of all translation (Toury 2012: 80).
The term “shift” was coined by J. C. Catford (1965) who defined shifts as depar-
tures from formal correspondence between the source text and the target text. In
other words, shifts account for all differences between the two. Many accounts on
shifts are rather technical in nature, listing dozens of linguistic moves translators
have at their disposal. This approach has never been appealing to me personally.
Perhaps that is why I have always found Douglas Robinson’s (2011) term “sway”
more inviting. Robinson frames sway in the direction of bias, mistranslation and
error (hence the word “problem” in the title of his book) – a perspective I do not
fully share – but he also, and importantly, foregrounds the somatic and affec-
tive grounding of translatorial choices that sway the translation in a particular
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

direction. Sara Ahmed (2014: 14) uses the word slide to talk about the same move-
ment: affects slide, and we slide with them. We are swayed by our bodily and emo-
tional responses to different stimuli, and our swaying makes the outcomes of our
actions, in this case translations, sway as well.
For understanding the affective nature of shifts, or swaying, the definition by
Anton Popovič (1970: 79) is also useful: “[a]ll that appears new with respect to
the original, or fails to appear where it might have been expected, may be inter-
preted as a shift”. Popovič introduces the interpretive aspects of shifts and focuses
on reception: all that appears new, or is different from what was expected, may
be interpreted as a shift. Shifts are thus not only a function of the relationship
between the source text and the target text, or of the subjectivity of the individual
translator, but also a function of the relationship between the target text and the
readers’ expectations (cf. Robinson 2011: 13 on sway as a group dynamics). We
will return to this crucial issue of expectations and their affective grounding in the
next section. Another valuable element in Popovič’s definition is that it allows us
to appreciate the role of shifts regardless of their degree of intentionality or volun-
tariness (cf. Blum-Kulka 1986/2000: 312). Shifts happen. And with them so does
affective modulation and swaying, intentional or accidental.
To stay within the EU context already introduced in this chapter, I will now
re-examine an analysis of shifts in the drafting and translating process (into Finn-
ish) of one EU document. The analysis was earlier published in Koskinen 2008
(Chapter 6). What follows is a very selective and narrow rereading only, rehearsed
here to provide an illustrative example of how shifts function as affective modula-
tors. A reader interested in a fuller picture is advised to consult the original source.
My keywords of the time did not include modulation (nor affect, for that matter).
In keeping with the general aims of the research project reported then, I focused
on interpersonal shifts, looking into aspects such as hedges, boosters, directives,
self-mention and ingroup–outgroup classifications that have been identified as
techniques for creating and negotiating distances and affinities (Hyland 2005). In
other words, without explicitly saying “affect” I was exploring issues closely related
to it, as textual distances and affinities are fundamentally affectively felt – a point I
will discuss at more length in the next section.
In the original analysis, particular attention was placed on the implied insti-
tutional writer and implied reader construed in the various text versions, both
of the source text and of the translation. In practice, this was accomplished “by
analyzing how the Commission as the institutional writer presents itself, and how
it addresses the readers, how the writer relates to other actors and to the ideational
content of the text, and what it expects from the others” (Koskinen 2008: 124).
Three groups of shifts were found to be particularly relevant in this respect: the
bureaucratization of the style, the omission of the words marking an evaluation or
appraisal and the loss of metaphors.
 Translation and Affect

Increased bureaucratization of style from one version to the next in both the
drafting and translating processes prompted me to propose a law that I now posit
may well apply universally to text work in institutional contexts: the law of growing
institutionalization (Koskinen 2008: 141). Basically, it assumes that the longer a text
is being processed within the institutional machinery, the more it loses any traits
that might signal a personal writer, and the more the institution and the institu-
tional phraseology push themselves to the forefront. This tendency will have obvi-
ous consequences for the affective engagement with readers who are not within the
inner institutional circle and will therefore likely find the style alienating.
The frequent omission of different markers of evaluation was a finding worth
mentioning here. Lost indications of attitudes included: “potential” [in: potential
benefits], “just” [the proportion was just 60.3%], “genuinely” [making learning
genuinely available to all], “tend to” [measures tend to be piecemeal → are], “much”
[much more open], “more actively” [promote more actively], “risk” [risk limiting
→ limit], “particularly”, “in particular”, and “as far as possible”. The result is that the
reader loses cues for interpreting the writer’s attitude and degree of engagement
towards the propositions.
Finally, the rerendering in translation of one feature was found to introduce
modulation in all language version: metaphors (Koskinen 2008: 137). It seems
somehow very apt, considering the topic of this book, to concentrate on one
metaphor in particular: the heart. The opening statement in the English origi-
nal document that was analysed proclaims as follows: “People are at the heart of
this communication.” Since heart is a metaphor with very strong positive affective
valence, and the attention-grabbing positioning also marks it as a powerful state-
ment, and since the proposition is explicitly attuned to the communication policy
in place, it is interesting to see what happens to the heart in translation.

Table 2. Translations of “heart”

Heart

DA det centrale
DE im Zentrum
ES el núcleo
FR au centre
IT al centro
NL gaat over mensen
POR no cerne
SV i centrum
FI etusijalla [in a priority position]
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

Table 2 shows that in none of the other then 10 official languages (Greek was
excluded from analysis) the heart or any other equally warm-hearted expression
was maintained. While the images of the centre or the nucleus can also be seen as
metaphoric, they lack the affective connotations of the heart, which the English
language can pick up from its standard repertoire to serve the new policy emphasis
on the citizens. The shift away from the heart does not result in a “wrong” transla-
tion in any language, as languages tend to commonly employ different metaphors,
and standard idioms are construed differently in different languages. One can also
argue that the heart has lost much of its semantic meaning in its metaphorical
usage and also much its emotional valence, in particular for native English-speak-
ers. This does not change the outcome that the tenor of the text is shifted in a way
that reduces its positive affective valence. We can debate whether this swaying of
the translations is significant or not. My argument is that microdecisions such as
these do matter.
On a more general level, research has identified a potential tendency towards
a reduced use of metaphors in translation and posited different reasons as poten-
tial explanations, such as adhering to target norms, aiming to minimize trans-
lation effort or favouring accuracy over appropriateness (Sidiropoulou 2004:
80–81; see also Toury 2012: 108). Be that as it may, for my present purposes it
is more interesting to ponder how this demetaphorization strategy affects the
readers’ relation to the text. Although we are only looking at a single metaphor,
its prominent position in the text and its positive affective valence make it stand
out, especially in an institutional text where the expectations are perhaps geared
towards the non-affective and non-metaphorical. The element of positive sur-
prise is therefore effective, and its loss in all language versions can be considered
detrimental to the communicative aims of the institution. The loss of metaphoric
language also works towards the same effect as the omission of evaluative mark-
ers and the bureaucratization of style: an overall flattening of the text, making it
more tiresome to read and, consequently, harder to comprehend and less easy to
feel affinity towards.
It needs to be emphasized that the document analysed above is in no way dis-
tinctive among EU texts. It was subtracted from the flow of paper trail randomly,
according to pre-set external criteria (Koskinen 2008: 119). This underlines my
core message: affective modulation is a regular and normal part of translation
work, not an exceptional decision to be taken under extraordinary conditions.
Reframing and modifying cognitive appraisal are in fact ingrained in transla-
tion in the sense that translation in itself is a reframing process, and the cogni-
tive appraisal of overt translations is automatically modified in the sense that the
reader is aware of the translatorial nature of the text they are reading and this
knowledge has a bearing on its appraisal.
 Translation and Affect

This idea of reframing by translating takes us to Erving Goffman’s work. He is

best known in translation studies for his concepts of facework and footing, both
mainly used in studying the interpreter’s role. Here I would like to draw attention
to two other concepts that may be used to illuminate translation work in both
written and spoken contexts: keying and framing. These two related strategies
that Goffman identifies in our everyday social behaviour are also very clearly
at play in translation. To arrive at keying and framing, we need to take a closer
look at modulation. I originally borrowed modulation to the world of transla-
tion research from its current usage in psychological affect studies, where it has
been an element of standard vocabulary since the 1990s, signalling the ability to
identify and adapt emotional states and responses according to environmental
cues (Koskinen 2012a). However, the notion of modulation also has a prior his-
tory in translation studies, as it was originally proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet
(1958) in their classic comparative stylistic analysis of French and English. In
their taxonomy of shifts, Vinay and Darbelnet define modulation as a strategy of
changing the point of view of the message without altering the idea or meaning
of the text, often with the aim of providing readers with a familiar and fluent,
natural-sounding rerendering (see also Chesterman 2016: 98–104). Examples of
modulation might include turning negative into positive (e.g., this is not bad →
this is good), passive into active (the shop window was smashed by a passer-by
→ a passer-by smashed the shop window) or shifting who or what is being fore-
grounded in the text.
Modulating is not the only music term in Vinay and Darbelnet’s taxonomy:
they also include transposition (change of pitch), with which they mean the shift
from one grammatical category to another (e.g., translating a noun by a verb).
Transposition is also included in Chesterman’s classification (2016: 93). While I
choose to foreground the music reference here (i.e., I am keying Vinay and Dar-
belnet’s terminology in that direction), it needs to be mentioned that transposition
is a term used in many fields with slightly varied meanings. It is also relevant to
mention that in their model, equivalence is – without any direct music allusion –
also related to modulation, and arguably more so than transposition. Equivalence
is often understood to indicate literal rerendering or word-for-word solutions, but
in Vinay and Darbelnet’s taxonomy it denotes a complete structural change used
to achieve semantic correspondence (e.g., idioms, slogans) and is therefore close
to what in today’s parlance is called transcreation and is often understood as the
complete opposite of equivalence.
Modulation, equivalence and transposition all bear similarities to what Erv-
ing Goffman called keying, with an explicit analogy to music (1974: 44). In music,
modulation is a synonym for keying: it is the act of changing from one key to
another. These subtle changes are an essential element of musicality, affecting the
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

tone, mood and energy levels of the piece. Similarly, in texts – and for Goffman in
everyday-life “strips of doing” (ibid.: 47) – keying introduces more or less subtle
changes of tone, mood, energy and interpretation. Keying introduces a systematic
transformation of the activity, a new frame. Although this transformation may be
subtle, it dramatically alters the participants’ understanding of what is going on
(ibid.: 45). For example, a playful key applied to fighting, or a staging key applied
to marriage vows, will radically alter the expectations of the participants and the
consequences of the action. Goffman (ibid.: 48) proposes a list of five core types of
keys: make-believe (e.g., playing and acting), contests (sports), ceremonials (ritu-
als; performative displays; practicing an activity), technical repetition and, finally,
regroundings (performances that have a radically altered reason or motivations
from those of ordinary actors). These kinds of keys, and the endless rekeying pos-
sibilities that they offer, produce a transformation of the keyed activity, and pro-
vide a new framing to what is going on.
Framing something as translated or interpreted can also be seen as a form of
keying. Goffman (1974: 79) mentions this in passing, but recognizes the possibili-
ties of multiple keyings. Indeed, a translatorial key may focus on make-believe, for
example, in the sense of a suspension of disbelief or legal fiction in the case of a
multilingual legal instrument where the various language versions are to be taken
as one intent (Šarčević 1997). Or it can be keyed ritually as in the case of frozen
translations of set phrases in a bilingual meeting (Koskela et al. 2017). Keying
translation as a technical reproduction is an obvious keying option, and one that is
embedded in many cultural practices such as the marketing of literary translations
and coding of interpreter’s professional practice (see Chapter 5 below). Reground-
ing, then, is an interesting case from the perspective of translatoriality: it is defined
as “the performance of an activity more or less openly for reasons or motives felt to
be radically different from those that govern ordinary actors” (Goffman 1974: 74).
In a way, all overt translation can be seen to fall into this category (their reasons
and motivations not being identical to the source text), but the idea of radicality
is not necessarily in place. Still, domestication and localization would seem to be
forms of adaptive keying that fall into this category, breaking away from the key of
technical repetition.
Every frame and key also have affective consequences, and all modulation also
operates on an affective level and is often initiated by affective concerns. Adequate
affective engagement and its regulation is also an expectation that governs recep-
tion. Acceptance, as well as the limits of acceptability, of a particular key is funda-
mentally (also) affective by nature, as are the adherence to and the normative role
of local traditions, agreement over exemplary representations, and so on. Keying
sets the tone, and the tone sets the affective valence of a particular strip of activity
or text. Sway with me.
 Translation and Affect

3.3 Reception, affinity and affect

Translators’ modulation strategies are often designed to meet certain known or

assumed expectations of the future target text readers. Translation studies has
been target-oriented in its outlook since the early days of its disciplinary gesta-
tion, and the notion of acceptability was firmly embedded in the early classic of
Gideon Toury (2012), originally published in 1980. Still, it is only during the past
fifteen years or so that reception studies have really gained prominence in transla-
tion studies. What happens at the reception stage, or what kind of a user experi-
ence the translations offer, is tightly connected to affects. Translation operates on
managing degrees of affinity and familiarity, two elements with strong affective
valence. As is well known, much of theorizing in translation works through the
perspective of adequate or acceptable degrees of foreignness in the target text, on
the one hand, and adequate or acceptable levels of adaptation to the local expecta-
tions, on the other. In this section, I will first discuss this issue briefly within the
context of EU translation, the theme that runs through this chapter, but I will
then move to another area of translation where I have invested significant research
input together with my colleague Outi Paloposki over the years: retranslation. I
will report on some of our findings to discuss the role of cultural expectations
and readers’ affective engagement in the reading of retranslations. From the per-
spective of affect, both EU translation and retranslation are illustrative domains as
they both need to operate along axes of difference and distance. In the case of the
EU, we are looking at an alien institutional system, located outside the national
borders, that wants and needs to be felt acceptably familiar to legitimize constant
interference in national affairs; in the case of retranslation the distance is not only
cultural but also temporal, and difference is necessary to manifest itself in the face
of apparent similarity with the preceding translation. There is a limit as to how
different a new translation of the same source text can be, but to rationalize its
existence it needs to be different enough.
The creation of difference and distance is a central element of affective labour.
James M. Thomas and Jennifer Correa (2016: 1) begin their book titled Affec-
tive Labour: (Dis)Assembling distance and difference with a reminder that the two
concepts are conjoined through practice, “conjuring material, symbolic, discur-
sive and affective realities for us as we move through everyday life.” Difference
produces (somatic, affective, ideological) distance, and distance is determined by
(spatial, social, political, historical) difference. Thomas and Correa underline the
affectivity of everyday life. The affective valence of everyday objects was discussed
above (in Section 3.1). Neuroscience observes the same phenomenon from a cog-
nitive perspective and posits that affect is closely intertwined with cognition and
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

that we actually bring emotions into all our contacts with objects, assigning affec-
tive valence to them:
[F]ew if any perceptions of any object or event, actually present or recalled from
memory, are ever neutral in emotional terms. Through either innate design or by
learning, we react to most, perhaps all, objects with emotions, however weak, and
subsequent feelings, however feeble. (Damasio 2004: 93)

In psychology, consistent findings show that unconscious preferences exert more

influence on our thoughts and actions than we realize (Franks 2007: 39). When
this is combined with the mere-exposure effect (also known as the familiarity
principle), a well-known psychological tendency to respond favourably to people,
statements and objects that are familiar to us, we can begin to hypothesize that
affective predispositions also play a role in how translations are received. I have
argued for a rethinking of Lawrence Venuti’s concepts of domestication and for-
eignization, claiming that instead of, or at least in addition to, viewing those two
strategies as inhabiting opposing poles on the axis of cultural distance, they should
be seen from the point of view of emotional affinity and familiarity.
[R]egardless of the translation strategies, and without necessarily pre-valorizing
either domesticating of foreignizing strategies, we experience the translations as
either affectively positive (familiar, pleasant, aesthetically pleasing) or negative
(strange, confusing, aesthetically unpleasant or uninteresting), depending on
what our own tendencies are, what kinds of previous experiences we have had,
and how our acculturation has predisposed us towards particular aesthetic solu-
tions. In other words, emotional distance need not have anything to do with cul-
tural distance: if I am predisposed to favour foreignizing translations (as all the
great scholars seem to advise us to be), I feel close to those kinds of translations,
and I orient myself towards those kinds of aesthetic solutions, and vice versa.
(Koskinen 2012a: 21)

Venuti’s (1995, 1998) theorization of foreignization, domestication, minoritizing

and resistance is quite complex, accounting for a bundle of normative expecta-
tions, cultural relations and familiarities as well as the situated realities of target
readers. His concept of foreignizing closely resembles ostranenie, or defamiliariza-
tion, an intentional alienation effect used as an artistic device (Koskinen 2000: 52).
As Venuti’s terminology has gained currency in translation studies, the approach
has become somewhat reduced, and foreignizing and domesticating are often used
to mean simplified strategies of source versus target orientation in the translated
text. As a result, the concepts have lost much of their connection to the idea of
relational aesthetic qualities and of negotiating the degrees of familiarity between
particular translation solutions and a distinct audience.
 Translation and Affect

The simplified version harks back to the images created by Friedrich

­Schleiermacher and argues that domesticating strategies bring the text to the reader,
or that foreignizing translations make the reader cross the distance. This spatial
imagery of a physical distance, with either the reader or the writer being asked to
bridge that distance through textual manoeuvres, may obscure the fact that we
are actually dealing with degrees of emotional affinity more than with degrees of
physical, or even cultural, affinity. In Venutian theorization, f­ oreignization aims to
create an intentional rupture in the readers’ affective affinity and alignment with
the artwork (Koskinen 2012a; see also Ahmed 2010: 37). This affective affinity
allows us to re-evoke spatiality, but not as an intertextual relation but as an inter-
nalized disposition of the reader to a particular translation:

[W]e are touched and moved by things that we like, some of them are even close
to our heart, and those that we do not like make us turn away or we push them
back or aside. In short, rather than – or in addition to – cultural or geographic
distance, we are dealing with affect.(Koskinen 2012a: 17)

The case of early Finnish EU translations in the mid-1990s, pre- and post-acces-
sion in 1995, illustrates this point (see Koskinen 2012a: 21–23). At the time, the
felt threat of excessive foreign influence in institutional Finnish lead to a policy
of an extremely ‘Finnicizing’ strategy for translating lexical items. It was dictated
that if any term or word had a native Finnish equivalent, it was to be preferred
over a loan word, regardless of whether the loan word was the more standardized
option and notwithstanding the potential obscurity of the ur-Finnish equivalent.
As a result, a report was not to be called “raportti” but “kertomus” (‘story’), and
co-ordination was not to be “koordinointi” but “yhteensovittaminen” (‘adjusting
together’), and so on. As one can see, the preferred choice tended to avoid affinity
with the source expression, even if the loan word was the one normally used in the
Finnish language. This principle has since been relaxed, but for the first few years
this was the institutionalized translation strategy for all genres in the Finnish sec-
tion of the translation service of the European Commission. For the readers, these
extremely Finnicized translations, although not “wrong”, appeared unnatural and
strange – that is, foreignizing. In other words, the attempted domesticating strategy
was experienced as alienating and foreignizing. At the same time, syntax and genre
features were expected to follow the non-natural-sounding foreign examples.
These, too, were experienced as foreignizing. Discontent lead to heated discus-
sions, letters to the editor, and finally an official report on the quality of Finnish
EU translations. This debacle nicely highlights the affective nature of affinity: the
two strategies of, on the one hand, ultra-localized lexis and, on the other hand,
alien syntax, macrostructure and genre features were diametrically opposed to one
another. Still, they were both experienced as foreignizing.
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

Retranslation, too, is entangled with the dialectics of affinity. The affinity that
immediately comes to mind is that with the source text, and the readily available
cultural assumption that the new translation is closer to the original than the old
one. Critics and regular readers alike seem to approach retranslation not only
analytically but also emotionally. Together with Outi Paloposki, we have stud-
ied this reception and found some affects that seem to be remarkably sticky and
durable. A bundle of recurrent, sticky, positive affects seems to circle around what
could best be labelled as presentism (Koskinen & Paloposki 2015a: 220–231):
we humans have a tendency to foreground our own perspective, our embodied
position in history and in the world. Hence the desire to think that our age can
correct the shortcomings of the past and arrive at complete and full interpreta-
tions. We are also quite quick to condemn past moral agendas and their effects
in translation decisions, but we are less likely to critically review our own ideo-
logical biases. Hence the desire for retranslation: we are confident that we can do
better. And when the retranslation is critiqued, the literary critic is predisposed
to assume that it outsmarts the predecessors. The reviews indeed tend to follow a
regular discursive pattern where the new translation is welcomed and praised for
its “fullness”, “freshness”, “contemporaneousness” or “accuracy”, and a segment
of a previous translation is often played against the new one, only to show how
much more successful the new one is (ibid.: 231–245). As discussed in Chapter
2, Sara Ahmed (2010: 29) emphasizes the stickiness of affects, defining affect as
that “what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas,
values, and objects”. Positive affects towards retranslation are indeed quite sticky,
and a presentist cultural pattern is easily activated in the brain of the critic and
the regular reader alike.
Researchers have followed suit. The best-known retranslation theory, the
Retranslation Hypothesis was based on the ideas first formulated in German
Romanticism and then elaborated in an early key text on retranslation (the essay
“La retraduction comme espace de la traduction” by Antoine Berman from 1990),
and finally adapted to conform to the structure of a hypothesis (Chesterman 2000).
Berman’s main thesis maintains an affinity to the idea of constant betterment that
underlines presentism as it positions subsequent translations on a line that pro-
ceeds from an assimilationist first translation (i.e., one too tied to the expectations
of the target readers) to a retranslation that stays closer to the original (i.e., is
more foreignizing for the readers who can now accept a more alienating version).
The hypothesis has been tested a number of times. While some cases have indeed
followed this pattern, it has been proved not to be a reliable prediction of what
goes on in different translation–retranslation pairs as many other options are also
possible (see, e.g., Paloposki & Koskinen 2004). But it is also clear by now that
both the degree of textual similarity to the source text and affective affinity to
 Translation and Affect

the intended readership are indeed factors that can be used to categorize differ-
ent retranslations, although their order of appearance does not dictate the level of
their assimilation or alienation.
As the titles of some of his best-known books (L’épreuve de l’étranger 1984;
La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain, 1999) amply illustrate, Berman’s
extensive work on translation and ethics revolves around questions of distance
and affinity, and how these should be managed. Berman (1984: 17) is clear in his
preferences, and he calls ethnocentric translation that does not convey the foreign-
ness of the foreign text simply bad translation.9 This tends to be the value judge-
ment of those who approach translation from a perspective of foreignness: their
desire is to maintain a degree of alienation. It is not only an affective but also an
aesthetic preference. Or rather, aesthetics, the encounter of the sensual work and
the sensate body, is all about affect (Highmore 2010: 121). Values, understandings
of beauty and moral judgements change, and this creates the need for retransla-
tion. Affect indeed plays a significant role in retranslation, both in the decision to
publish a new translation (i.e., the current reception of the previous translation,
and the problems or shortcomings associated with it) and in the reception of the
new one. It is also an element in the life of the retranslator, and of the first transla-
tor whose work is subjected to reappraisal by retranslation. For the retranslator,
the most worrisome affinity may often be with the previous translation, and accu-
sations of plagiarism or dependence can create anxieties of influence that colour
the retranslation process (Koskinen & Paloposki 2015b).
Newness is a selling point for retranslations, but among readers, nostalgia and
emotional attachment also have a role to play. This is particularly true of texts that
play ritual roles in social situations. New translations of the Bible, for example,
have encountered resistance because particular wordings are engrained in our
minds and evoke memories. Douglas Robinson describes how the familiar Bible
translation may resonate in our body:
There is, in fact, a kind of bodily reassurance in a translation like the KJV [King
James Version]: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” may sound to Eugene
Nida like a lack of desire for God … but of course for the Christian who memo-
rized those words in childhood the “normal” somatic response, the response to
the words if heard on the street, is massively overridden by the somatics of secu-
rity. When I say these words, my world feels stable and safe.
(Robinson 1991: 225)

. “J’appelle mauvaise traduction la traduction qui, généralement sous couvert de transmis-

sibilité, opère une négation systématique de l’étrangeté de l’oeuvre étrangère.”
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

Affect memory, that is, an emotionally expressed feeling that recurs when recall-
ing a significant experience, is what we respond to in listening to a recital of a
translated ritual text; we are reconnected to the affective valence of the contexts
where we have previously heard it. A new translation will encounter resistance,
as the ritualistic affective experience gets broken. The reception of the Finnish
retranslations of the Bible are an example of how affective memory unsettles easy
interpretations of domestication and foreignization:

Some readers still prefer the familiar 1938 translation of the Bible to the most
recent, fluent and domesticated Finnish version from 1992, not so much in spite
of, but precisely because of its more foreignizing style that lends the text a more
elevated and ceremonial aura and because this more foreignized version (itself
a retranslation) of the text is more familiar to them than the newer retransla-
tion. There are passages that we have learnt by heart such as “Ja tapahtui niinä
päivinä…,” the opening words of Luke 2 – in the 1938 version – which have tra-
ditionally been read out in school Christmas celebrations and at other events, as
well as in many homes on Christmas Eve. Because of their ritual role, passages
like this resonate emotionally in ways that other versions may be unable to echo.
The technically more foreignizing earlier retranslation is thus, for these readers,
more domesticating than the overtly more accessible new version. In spite of its
fluent and “domesticated” translation strategy, the new version remains foreign to
readers who had already responded emotionally, creating a bond with the previ-
ous version. (Koskinen 2012a: 24–25)

Another nostalgic genre is children’s literature. Children’s classics are a prime

example of how affect memory affects the intergenerational reader experience: a
new translation may well be objectively seen as ‘better’ or more accurate or ‘closer’
to the original than the previous one, but many adult readers prefer a version that
repeats their childhood experiences (Koskinen 2012a: 24). Classic children’s books
also constitute an affective intergenerational chain that accentuates the dual audi-
ence aspect always present in children’s literature. Interestingly, our memory may
also fail us, and the fond memories we harboured may become shattered at an
actual encounter with the old translation. The classics get retranslated when the
parental and grandparental wish to ritually pass on the cultural capital vested in
them meets with some resistance because of the changed expectations and pref-
erences of the new child readers or because of new visual or textual aesthetics
and ideologies of the literary field, including the parents themselves. In such a
clash, the classic can be salvaged through what Goffman might call regrounding:
a radically altered rationale or motivations in comparison to the previous transla-
tion, that will allow the text to be to transformed, downplayed, cut or censored
to avoid the unwanted elements. These retranslations often balance between
sameness and difference. To function in the cultural memory role, the new
 Translation and Affect

translation needs to bear the same identity with the previous version although it
at the same time parts ways with it to a significant degree. Key characters’ names,
for example, may need to be kept in their already familiar form, while some other
textual elements, cultural references or ideological underpinnings may (need to)
be radically altered to meet contemporary preferences. Ahmed (2010: 30) calls
those elements that are non-conforming and non-fitting in the “drama of contin-
gency” as “affect aliens”. In the everyday drama, those who have alien affects may
be affect aliens, and so are those who cause affects we find non-fitting and alien.
Sometimes a once-accepted textual element can become affectively alien as times
change. A good contemporary example is racialized vocabulary, found in many
classics and increasingly felt to be an affect alien to many contemporary readers.
The resulting alienation makes some words saturated with affect. The most obvi-
ous contemporary example of a word sticky with affect is the n-word, that is, the
vocabulary denoting black-skinned persons that has become affectively so alien
and taboo that it has become commonplace to shorten it to the first letter only.
The metonymic affective economy around this word is creating new sticky affects
of censorship and taboo that also travel across cultures, making waves of moral
outrage that repeat the same patterns across borders. Once these kinds of affective
intensities have gained force, their often vague and undetermined beginnings may
be easily forgotten (Bertelsen & Murphie 2010: 139). For translators, the changing
affective politics and the travelling outrages often create problems in translating
classics from a different era, displaying different affective constellations that are
difficult to reproduce in the current climate but also difficult to avoid without cen-
sorship which, too, is affectively problematic. Researchers are not exempt of being
affected. For me personally, researching the translation history of the n-word into
Finnish has functioned as a test case to my own abilities of academic risk-taking.
I currently have a finalized research article on the topic on my computer, but,
much to my shame, I hesitate to submit it for publication, because I do not feel I
am ready to handle the potential outrage from readers whose views I may offend
in the text. I have always had the self-image of a fearless researcher, and reaching
the limit of my fearlessness, and experiencing the affects involved in this case, has
been a sobering experience indeed.

***

Affects are indeed social. And they are also bodily and cognitive. The comparative
relevance of body and mind is one of the most central lines of division in affect
studies, and some approaches eschew any discursive and textual elements, seeing
them as a layer of codification that prevents us from accessing the true realm of
affects, and emphasizing the preconscious and non-representational aspects that
 Chapter 3. Appraising and modulating affective valence in translation 

go beyond language (see Wetherell 2012: 52; cf. Ahmed 2014). For this present
book, the point is moot. We can appreciate the role of the bodily sensations in
appraisals and the ways bodies are involved in affecting and being affected, and
we can value the notion of affect as a free-flowing social force, but to understand
affect in the realms of translating and interpreting, we also need to acknowledge
and appreciate affect in its textual and discursive manifestations. Affect may well
also take non-representational forms, but as translating and interpreting are deci-
sively representational and discursive at heart, it would be foolish to overlook the
textual to understand the affective. The ways in which affects are “narrated, com-
municated, shared, intensified, dispersed, modified and sometimes re-awoken”
(Wetherell 2012: 53) are crucially relevant to translatorial activities. Regulating
and modulating affects in and through discourse is a central part of translatorial
affective labour.
 chapter 4

The misery and splendour of translating

Translating is about affecting, but it is also about being affected. This chapter focuses
on the concept of the translator’s experiencing self (Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016)
and looks at the rich variety of affects provoked by the process of translating in the
translators themselves. It is quite easy to vision that translating content related to
violence or trauma or contrary to one’s own ethical convictions or religious views
can be emotionally taxing. It is also sensible to assume that emotionally skilled
translators fare better in these kinds of conflicts, that supporting translators’ skills
in emotion management will help them protect themselves from these harmful
effects and that it is ethically advisable to avoid these commissions if possible.
What is perhaps less often seen as an interesting object of study is the everyday
affective involvement of translators with the material they are translating.
As Séverine Hubscher-Davidson (2018: 31) observes, translators’ own emo-
tions have lacked visibility in translation studies literature. Affects are, I argue,
not a special case, related to exceptionally taxing translation tasks, but a normal,
humane response to any activity we engage in, including translation: we are excited
or anxious about the task ahead; pleased with or worried about our performance;
we enjoy a flow or get annoyed if not making any progress and so on. As we go
about our daily life, we do not necessarily pay too much attention to these passing
affective states unless they are for some reason intensified, or something in the
process triggers us into reflection. The more upset we are, the more likely we are
to pay attention (hence the emphasis on the traumatic). In my own professional
career, I too have sometimes experienced these moments of intensification. As a
young translator, I was assigned to translate a textbook on art therapy. It contained
compelling narratives of cases where art therapy had been successfully applied
in practice. Some of these stories, especially those involving children, made me
cry. So, my daily routine developed into something like this: translate until you
are in tears, cry your eyes out, repeat for six to eight hours, and then unwind and
regain balance by watching a daily dose of The Bold and the Beautiful. Mental
health issues, one might say, clearly fall into the category of potentially emotion-
ally touching content to be translated. But it was less the actual content, I think,
than the combination of a difficult situation in the family and my immersion into
 Translation and Affect

the text that resulted in my emotional reaction, and in its outwardly visible physi-
ological manifestation. We can discuss my emotion management and regulation
skills at the time, and find them lacking, but the anecdote also emphasizes the
holistic nature of human activity. Translation processes are interlaced with the
translator’s life as it takes shape, and the combinations can be unpredictable. In
translation studies, it has become a cliché to say that translations always exist in
a context. In the past decades, the cultural, ideological, poetic and, most recently,
economic and technological aspects of that context have been brought under scru-
tiny. Translators, too, exist in their context, both socio-cultural and personal. The
current trend favours focusing on the translators, and a large body of research
now exists on the translators’ habitus, that is, the ingrained and embodied disposi-
tions they have acquired in dialogue with their context (Vorderobermeier 2014).
This context extends beyond the translation task, to the lived personal experiences
within which the translatorial activities are embedded.
As exemplified by the tears discussed above, affects can be manifested in bodily
reactions. These may be observable and measurable, or only felt by the experienc-
ing persons themselves. Witness a spontaneous Facebook comment made by a
translator who had just completed a translation on dental health:

Helpotuksen huokaus. Nyt ei tarvitse hetkeen katsella suuhun mädäntynyttä

purukalustoa edes kuvista, sillä sain äsken valmiiksi kariesta käsittelevän kään-
nöksen, jonka tekeminen oli yhtä hammasten kiristystä. Ihan kuin olisin aistinut
vihlontaa ja tuntenut plakin leviävän… Onneksi kävin vajaat kaksi viikkoa sitten
hammaslääkärissä kuulemassa, että kaikki on kunnossa.
 (anonymized Facebook status update 7.3.2018)
Phew. No need to look at mouths filled with rotten teeth for a while, not even in
pictures, as I have just finished a translation on tooth decay. Its completion was
pure gnashing of teeth. I felt like my own teeth were aching and the dental plaque
was spreading… Luckily, I had just visited a dentist two weeks ago, so I knew
everything was alright. (my translation)

The above status update refers to the content of the translation task. Translators
may also respond affectively to their authors (remember the demand to only
translate for love discussed in Chapter 2). Feelings of love and friendship can of
course occur, but the intimacy of the translation task may also bring to the fore
other, more negative affects. My most recent published translation is a collection
of articles by the American sociologist Erving Goffman (2013). He has a number
of annoying habits as an author: He will lead you on, presenting a commonly
acceptable view, in a fairly complex manner, until suddenly changing course,
revealing the untenacity of the view you thought the two of you were constru-
ing in agreement. He is sarcastic, at times even mean towards his readers. Not a
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

lovable personality, and he keeps his translator on her toes. During the transla-
tion process I was often upset and annoyed. Once – by his shrewd observations
on the marriage tactics, and consequent behaviour, of young American women,
and the pointlessness of giving them career opportunities because of this – he
made me push the laptop away from me and jump to my feet in outrage: you just
cannot say that! But of course, he could, and he had, and I could not deny his
observations in the US of the time of his writing. So, I translated, with absolute
unwillingness.
If we tied translators to a number of clinical equipment, measuring heart
rate, blood pressure, perspiration, pupillometrics and so on, we could observe the
bodily manifestations of the affective states as they unfold during any translation
task. This has, to my knowledge, not been done yet, and it is beyond my areas of
expertise to do so. For the time being, we are mainly left with translators’ own nar-
ratives of their affective involvement (Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016). Hence also
my recourse to my own memories above. It would be interesting to invite transla-
tors to recount similar memories of affectively critical incidents in a manner akin
to intercultural competence training. These stories could then be used both in
research and in classroom discussions.
Narrating translation work is a well-known genre with a long history, particu-
larly in literary and academic translation. Narratives such as prefaces and essays
on translation can even be seen to form the pre-disciplinary backbone of transla-
tion theory. The tradition of explaining one’s principles in paratexts has contin-
ued until modern times, and some contemporary scholars, too, have constructed
their theoretical arguments around their own translation work (see e.g., Venuti
2003/2013). This chapter is built around another kind of narration: the published
diaries of a Finnish translator, that is, autobiographical writing (Kaindl 2017). This
chapter reports on the findings of an analysis of this translator’s diary entries from
the point of view of reported affect and emotion. Affects are an elusive object for
study. It needs to be underlined that I do not expect the narrated expressions to
report directly back to emotional experiences, but I do indeed believe that the
systematic thematization of expressions of feeling reported below will allow us
to analyse how these microlevel elements connect together to build meaningful
affective configurations, or socially experienced “structures of feeling” (Williams
1977: 132; Sharma & Tygstrup 2015: 5).

4.1 Translator Saarikoski and his diaries

My data originates from the published diary of a renowned Finnish poet and
translator, Pentti Saarikoski (1937–1983). Saarikoski is one of the key figures in
 Translation and Affect

the history of literary translation in Finland. He had rigorously prepared himself

for a career as an author from the age of 14, and he also has a significant body
of his own prose and poetry. As a translator he was productive and versatile.
Between the age of 21 and his untimely death, he published some 70 translations
from Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian and German. The texts
vary from classical Greek poetry to contemporary North-American fiction. He
is not the most prototypical translator figure in that he was a celebrity and a
high-profile actor in the literary scene. But as I hope to demonstrate, the senti-
ments and affects he experienced during translating are perhaps not alien to
other translators either.
Saarikoski is known for his bold and creative translations. The term “Saa-
rikoski syndrome” has been used in the Finnish literary field to refer to translating
in an excessively self-asserting and exaggerated manner. This image of boldness
originates from some of Saarikoski’s debated and high-profile translations and the
media attention that surrounded him. His Ulysses translations (both Joyce’s and
Homer’s) were considered classics in themselves; Catcher in the Rye made him a
celebrity among the youth; the translation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in
1962 brought the publishing house a lawsuit that Saarikoski turned into a media
circus. Saarikoski yearned for public recognition, and his four marriages, his left-
wing political stances, his recurring depressions and his worsening alcoholism
were widely known. Translating and writing continued side by side throughout
his career, sometimes blending into one another (some known pseudotranslations
are actually his own poems) (Koskinen 2007a). Translating was a way to earn a
living, but he also liked it and it gave him satisfaction. While he is known to have
submitted some less than refined translations of what he considered minor texts,
he invested a lot of effort in those translation tasks he found personally interesting
and culturally important. He also often translated in a manner that is more modest
than his bold image would allow one to expect.
All this makes Saarikoski an interesting object of study. I have previously writ-
ten a translator profile of him and an overview of his Joyce translation (Koskinen
2007a, 2007b), looked at his translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew from the
point of view of retranslation (Paloposki & Koskinen 2004) and his more recent
role as the overshadowing first translator exerting his presence in retranslation
processes (Koskinen & Paloposki 2015b). For my present purposes, however, his
special traits and unique talent are less important than his manic autobiographical
writing, which offers a wealth of data for my analysis. Saarikoski was a Knaus-
gårdean author who depicted the nitty-gritty details of his own life and of those
near him in his texts. The diaries I will be analysing in this chapter were written
with publication in mind from the start. The book where they are collected and
which I use as my data, Suomentajan päiväkirjat (“Translator’s diaries”, ed. H. K.
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

Riikonen and Janna Kantola) only came out in 2012, but the diaries contain refer-
ences to publication plans, which indicate they were never written for exclusively
private use.10
[En voi] olla ajattelematta että tämä joskus julkaistaan. Tämä pitäisi käsittää
jonkinlaiseksi romaanin ensimmäiseksi luonnokseksi: vetelen viivoja sinne tänne
ja katson tulisiko tästä jotakin. (p. 15–16)
I cannot avoid thinking that this might be published one day. This should be
understood as a first draft of a novel: I draw some lines here and there and see if
anything comes out of it.11

As one can see from the quote above, Saarikoski also refers to the text as a first
draft of a novel, that is, a fictional work. It is therefore an open question as to what
extent the translating protagonist or other characters in the diaries equal the real
life of Pentti Saarikoski or those around him. Still, as far as I can tell, all factual
information is accurate, and to my knowledge those depicted in the diaries have
not objected to the reported events after publication. I am leaning on Philippe
Lejeune’s (2009: 201) well-known theorizing of the diary as antifiction, as a genre
“hooked on truth” . I am also inclined to take at face value Saarikoski’s desire for
brutal honesty, even in the context of creating a narrative identity (Ricoeur 1991),
and I will proceed from the expectation that the material in his diaries is not writ-
ten with a polished public image in mind:
Minulla on joskus mielessä että saisin tähän kesävihkoon mahtumaan niin paljon
lauseita, että niitä kun hölskyttäisi saisi kuvan siitä millainen minä nyt olen.
 (p. 14)
I sometimes think that it would be good to fit so many sentences into this ­summer
notebook that if you shake it you can get a picture of me as I am now.

In analysing this data, one needs to keep in mind the stated intentions to go pub-
lic (at the same time remembering that this intention was itself revealed to us
readers within the narrative structure of the diaries). The public/private distinc-
tion is not, however, considered an essential defining feature of diaries (Lejeune
2009). Even if the diaries were indeed written for private use only, the narrative
form limits the access to internal affective states: via narratives we can only gain
knowledge of those affects the individual can be conscious of and is able and
willing to also express. This may be considered a handicap, but it also captures

. In an end note, the editors inform the readers that the diaries are published “as such”
(p. 507).
. All translations of the data are mine.
 Translation and Affect

the dual nature of affect. It is not only private and internal but also collective and
social. Narrated affect demonstrates the kinds of affect we are able to identify and
willing to share. Saarikoski’s shameless style of sharing adds to the value of his
diaries as data for my purposes. Diaries also capture “the day-to-day process of
self-construction” (Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016: 83). The experiencing self is not
a solid and permanent construct but a work in progress, and the diary entries are
composed accounts in and of that process (Holstein & Gubrium 2000: 107), less
likely to depict a fixed identity than to show fragmentations and fluctuations. Saa-
rikoski’s diaries do not give us a stainless window to his affective states but they
are naturally occurring data in the sense that the data has not been provoked by
the researcher, nor produced with the purpose of focusing on emotions, feelings
and affects in mind.
From the book-length publication (440 pages of diaries plus afterwords etc.),
I have selected the first four sections for detailed analysis. Together they stretch
to 124 pages – that is, one fourth of the diary material – and cover the time frame
from Summer 1970 to Winter 1971. During this time Saarikoski was mainly work-
ing on Homer’s Ulysses but he also finalized Christy Brown’s Jonnekin päivästä
pois (orig. Down All the Days) for publication and started working on John Barth’s
The Floating Opera. Several other translations are also briefly mentioned in some
entries. Some of the entries are long (several pages) and undated; others are short
commentaries (a couple of lines) of a particular day. Although the publication is
titled as a translator’s diaries, the entries are not restricted to translation topics
only. On the contrary, sometimes the writer focuses entirely on other issues such
as on the political situation and his own political ambitions, on his family life and
the lives of friends and neighbours, and on how his own writing for the next book
advances, or rather how it does not.
The first three parts on my data focus on the summer of 1970, which
­Saarikoski and his family and entourage spent on a summer cottage12 (in the
fourth section they are back in Helsinki). The section discusses the successes of
mushroom picking in the nearby forest; whose turn it is to heat up the sauna by
the lake; how much he and others drank on a particular day and what they con-
sumed; whether he has had sex or quarrels with the wife and whether the baby
daughter he is tending to allows him to work or not during a particular day. Life,

. Writing this book piecemeal in a string of locations across Europe and beyond (I am
writing this note in Torrevieja as an addition to a section I first started putting together
in Cork) perhaps makes me more attuned to the affective relevance of place than normal.
Tracing the image of home, in general, and summer cottage or vacation home, in particular,
in translators’ narratives would allow for a fascinating window to the spatialities involved in
translating (see also Barthes 2005: 9 and Chapter 6).
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

in more detail than we care to know about. Sometimes with direct reference to
translating, sometimes not.
From these diaries I have extracted all propositions that I interpreted as con-
taining (1) some affective stance, and (2) a reference to translation. I then placed
them into a separate Excel file, and classified them first according to the theme and
then according to positive versus negative valence. The classification proceeded
iteratively, as I started creating themes at the same time as I started collecting
data, and the classification scheme was fine-tuned as I went along. A number of
propositions contained more than one theme; if there were more than two, I split
the proposition into several segments to keep the analysis controllable. The total
amount of these segments is 103, which means that on average there was almost,
but not quite, one affectively laden proposition concerning translation per page.
When I stopped, having felt my data begin to saturate in the sense of not needing
additional primary themes – I had identified thirteen primary themes related to
affective stances towards translation. These were: self-confidence, satisfaction with
oneself, satisfaction with translation product, satisfaction with the translation pro-
cess, satisfaction with translation work, absorption in work, conditions surrounding
work, relation to source text, embodied aspects of translation, shame, trust, grati-
tude, and finally, affects of others. Many entries contained elements of more than
one theme, as there were additional themes coming up in a secondary position
or zoomed into after a more general remark. In addition to the ones mentioned
above, I listed activities such as comparison to other translators, and comparison of
translation to other activities, comparison of translation to source text and affects
such as attention seeking, insecurity and defiance. These secondary elements also
have some bearing in the analysis that follows, although it is mainly based on the
primary themes.
As one can see, my inductively produced classification model is more a work-
ing heuristic than a fully consistent or extremely clear roster for repeatable analysis.
The secondary items, in particular, are more of a shorthand than a consistent set
of classes, and the primary ones are not a tidy lot. Still, I feel quite confident that,
had I continued with further diary entries, most of the new propositions would
have continued to fall into those eight persistent classes which form the backbone
of my analysis below. In the following section, I will not proceed from one theme
to another. Instead, I have regrouped the positive and the negative affects together
and will discuss and interpret them one after the other, starting with the negative
ones as they were more prevalent in the data (it contained 48 primarily negative
propositions and 41 positive ones).13

. Fourteen propositions were classified as neutral or ambivalent.

 Translation and Affect

In what follows I will use some raw numbers to give an overview of the extent
to which individual themes came up, but I wish to emphasize the qualitative nature
of this content analysis, and the limits of quantifying. Simply being mentioned
more of less often cannot automatically be interpreted as signalling relevance.
Nevertheless, the recurrences do give us some idea of what kinds of topics occu-
pied the mind of this translator and compelled him to jot them down. Limiting my
data to the first four sections in the book was a decision I made as the data seemed
to have become saturated in the sense that entirely new themes no longer emerged
after that point. It may well be that some interesting one-off topics are therefore
not represented in the analysis, but I trust the overview is not entirely skewed. In
the following I present my findings, a portrait of a translating man. The analysis
proceeds largely through direct quotations, both to allow the translator to have his
own voice heard also in the original Finnish, and also to provide opportunities for
readers to assess the validity of my analysis.

4.2 Impostor syndrome as a translatological malaise

The diary is a person-focused genre. It invites the author to reflect on what I

think, how I feel and how my day has been. Still, it was a bit unexpected that self-
confidence (31 occurrences) is the most recurrent theme in this data. When it is
combined with closely related themes of satisfaction with oneself (16), with the
translation product (5) and with the translation process (7), the picture becomes
very self-centred. The translator returns to contemplating whether he is up to the
task and whether he likes what he is doing. Self-confidence is the only of these
four themes where positive affective evaluations outnumber negative ones, and
even there only barely (15 to 14). In all three themes revolving around satisfac-
tion, negative stances are more prevalent than positive ones, to the extent that the
analysed diary sections contain no positive appraisals of the translation at hand
whatsoever. In each theme, a couple of propositions are neutral or ambivalent, but
the general tone tilts heavily towards negative appraisals.
Looking at the theme of self-confidence in more detail, we find that at the
beginning of the process of translating Homer, the translator is optimistic but also
realistic. A number of comments relate to Saarikoski’s trust that he will be fine:
En pidä mitään kiirettä nyt. Teen sitä mukaa kuin miellyttää. (p. 9)
I am not going to rush things now. I will work at a pace that feels good.

The diary contains continuous neutral commentary of how many stanzas have
been translated and how the project will proceed. These were not included in
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

the data as they were not considered affectively laden, but they do of course pro-
vide a positively attuned background hum of satisfaction to counterbalance the
more negatively valenced comments. The translator is also quite cheerful about
accepting that the plans may need to be readjusted, with no signs of faltering
confidence:
Mahdollista on että tämä aikataulu brakaa täydellisesti; ihme olisi jos kaikki
joskus menisi kesällä tehdyn suunnitelman mukaan. (p. 20)
It may well be that this schedule goes totally bonkers; it would be a miracle indeed
if anything for once actually went as planned in the summer.

Although a number of things such as the meter of the translation remain unde-
cided, the translator appears to be confident about eventually finding the solutions
– or at least about finding a solution that will outsmart the previous Homer trans-
lator (cf. retranslators’ anxiety of influence discussed in Section 3.3):
En ole vielä päättänyt, millaista rytmiä käytän, enkä haluakaan päättää sitä
etukäteen, uskon että se ensi talven aikana hahmottuu mielessäni. (p. 77)
I have not yet decided what kind of rhythm I will use, and I don’t even want to
decide it in advance, I believe it will become clear to me over the winter.
Otto Mannisen yritys matkia heksametriä on mieletön, en voi ollenkaan
ymmärtää mitä järkeä siinä on. (p. 77)
Otto Manninen’s [Homer: Odysseia, 1924] attempt to imitate the hexameter is
insane; I cannot understand the point of it.

As the summer and the translation task progress, some of the positive and optimis-
tic statements, too, begin to comment on earlier uncertainty. It is as if the transla-
tor allowed himself to also accept and confess doubts only after having resolved
them, as the diary entries reveal a continued self-questioning alongside statements
of self-confidence.
En minä oikein uskonut, että Homeroksesta mitään tulisi, kun kreikankielen tai-
tonikin oli jo niin ruosteessa, mutta nyt tiedän että se menee, ei helposti mutta
menee kuitenkin. (p. 85)
I did not really believe the Homer translation would work out, not with my Greek
being so rusty and everything, but now I know it will; not easily, but it will.
Odysseian kääntäjänä minun pitää olla uusi runonlaulaja, eikä yrittää palauttaa
runoa sen ”alkuperäiseen” muotoon. Kyllä minä onnistun. (p. 91)
As a Ulysses translator I need to be a new poet, and not to try to return it to its
“original” form. I will succeed.
 Translation and Affect

Homer is not a typical case of literary translation, as it requires philological exper-

tise and special skills. With his classical education that included ancient Greek
language and literature, and with his own poetic practice, Saarikoski was in many
ways an optimal person for the task. The challenge still felt intimidating to him,
and he sorely felt lacking in his academic expertise:
Jos olisin tarpeeksi oppinut, haluaisin rakentaa oman versioni Odysseiasta,
antaisin siis kaikkien myöhempien laitosten olla ja lähtisin käsikirjoituksista ja
kokoaisin säilyneistä säkeistä eepoksen vaikkapa yhtä omavaltaisesti kuin Lön-
nrot Kalevalan. … Nyt noudatan Victor Bérardin käsitystä. (p. 10)
If I were learned enough, I would like to build my own version of Ulysses; I would
leave all later editions aside and I would begin from the manuscripts and collate
the existing rimes into an epic as single-handedly as Lönnrot did with Kalevala.
… Now I just follow the interpretation of Victor Bérard.
Kello on 17.15 kun tänään lopetan työt; alan tulla IV laulun puoliväliin, jossa
­Bérard kovasti järjestelee vakiintunutta Homeros-tekstiä uudelleen, ja minulla ei
ole edellytyksiä ottaa kantaa. Entäpä jos uudemmat tutkimukset ovat osoittaneet
että B:n tekstinsiirrot ovat täysin perustelemattomia? No, minä käännän B:n mu-
kaan, katson miltä se vaikuttaa, jätän kysymyksen avoimeksi. (p. 40)
It is 5.15 PM when I call it a day today; I am approaching the second half of song
IV where Bérard radically reorganises the accepted version of Homer, and I have
no ability to take a stand. What if more recent research has proven that B’s reshuf-
flings are entirely ungrounded? Oh well, I’ll translate according to B, see how it
looks, and leave this question open.14
Homerosta vähän, ja masentava tietoisuus että en ole tarpeeksi oppinut suoriutu-
akseni kunnolla tästä työstä.
A little bit of Homer, and the depressing knowledge that I am not learned enough
to perform this task properly. (p. 91)

Saarikoski studied widely but never graduated from university, and this may have
contributed to the nagging sense of not being worthy of Homer.
Kun minulta kysytään, mitä nykyään teen, sanon kääntäväni ”yhtä amerikkalaista
romskua”: en kehtaa sanoa kääntäväni Homerosta! (p. 97)
When people ask me what I am working on, I say I am translating “a piece of
American lit”: I am embarrassed to say that I am translating Homer!

. Saarikoski’s worry was not unfounded. Later research has not been kind to Bérard’s in-
terpretations, and Saarikoski’s reliance on Bérard has consequently been seen to diminish the
value of his translation (Hosiaisluoma 1998: 118).
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

Saarikoski’s lack of academic credentials also added to his self-doubts. Although the
diaries were explicitly written with publication in mind, the intimate and instanta-
neous format of diary writing shows us the insecurities and anxieties Saarikoski’s
other, more directly public writings steered away from. Saarikoski exerted, both in
his translations and in his original fiction, a significant modernizing influence in
Finnish as a literary language (Koskinen 2007a). He also forwarded his agenda in
a series of essays in the Finnish literary journal Parnasso. The public debate over
meter can also be read in this light, as another manifesto for a new modern aes-
thetics, steering away from the clumsy poetics of the preceding generation. But a
comparison of its belligerent tone with the self-doubts expressed in the diaries also
suggests another explanation: a forceful attack against the academic translation
style can be seen as (over-)compensation for Saarikoski’s own anxieties.
The diaries reflect anxieties and self-doubts also beyond the Homer transla-
tion. A large body of Saarikoski’s translation work consists of American fiction. He
translated Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller and many others. His classical
training did not, however, give him a firm footing in this task, and critiques of
his translations often pointed to his shortcomings. The diaries show that he was
acutely aware of the limits of his language skills and cultural competence and the
need for continuous improvement:

Täytyisi lukea, kreikkalaista filologiaa (etteivät ne pääse hyppimään nenälle sitten

kun Odysseia on valmis), englantilaista ja amerikkalaista kirjallisuutta (että olisi
hyvä edes yhdessä kielessä) (p. 102)
I should read, Greek philology (so that they cannot carp when the Homer transla-
tion is finished), English and American literature (so that I would be good in at
least one language)
En osaa amerikanenglantia niin kuin kääntäjän pitäisi, mutta kuinka kauan pitäi-
si Amerikassa elää että oppisi tuntemaan kielen sielun? (p. 17)
I do not master American English the way a translator should, but for how long
would one need to live in the States to get to know the soul of that language?

The critical voices against Saarikoski have become more prominent over the years
and were at least partially responsible for the decision to commission a retransla-
tion of The Catcher in the Rye in 2004 (Koskinen & Paloposki 2015b). While some
shortcomings in the case of The Catcher, for example, are undeniable, the critics
also have a flair of knocking a dominant predecessor down from his pedestal. The
diaries make it clear that Saarikoski was quick to raise these critical points himself:
minulla kun on aina sellainen (oikea) tunne että vedän lukijoita nenästä. (p. 17)
I always have this (accurate) feeling of pulling the readers’ leg.
 Translation and Affect

An invitation to a James Joyce Symposium in Trieste spiralled Saarikoski into ago-

nizing over the tasks of socializing with others and of speaking English in public,15
and he foresaw a massive failure on a number of fronts: failing to behave and to
control his drinking, failing to speak English and failing to meet the expectations
of expertise in Joyce:
Minä siellä sitten kännissä sönkötän että minä en ole enää mikään James Joyce
Fan, kun nykyään käännän Homerosta.  (p. 26)
I will be totally wasted and will go around stuttering that I am no longer a James
Joyce Fan, as I am translating Homer now.

In contrast to the image emerging from the diaries, Saarikoski’s public demeanour
was arrogant and self-asserting, as the above discussion on the Homer meter indi-
cated. He responded to critiques of his poor English skills with detailed descrip-
tions of a careful source text analysis and thought-out solutions, and he sometimes
attacked previous translators vehemently. The diaries, too, contain a number of
belligerent and defiant statements whose passive-aggressive tone seems to be writ-
ten to appease inner conundrums. Amidst beating himself up for unsatisfactory
language skills in English, he found solace in reminding himself of his successful
translation of Joyce’s Ulysses:
Mutta onnistuihan Ulysseskin jotenkuten, vaikka osaankin englantia huonom-
min kuin joku vastavalmistunut fil.kand.  (p. 91)
The Ulysses translation is not too bad either, although my English is poorer than
that of a newly graduated MA.
Kai tapaan siellä sen japanilaisen professorinkin joka Dublinissa sanoi että Ul-
ysseksen kääntämiseen menee vähintään 500 vuotta. Pyhäinhäväistystä se niissä
piireissä on että minä käänsin Odysseuksen kahdessa vuodessa.  (p. 26)
I guess I will also meet the Japanese professor there [in Trieste] who told me in
Dublin that it will take at least 500 years to translate The Ulysses. It is blasphemy
in those circles that I translated it in two years.

Professors, and the academic and cultural establishment in general, were Saarikos-
ki’s soft spot. His incomplete university studies fed into an inferiority complex
that often manifested itself in personal attacks such as the dispute on hexameter.
In his diary, he was already anticipating criticism and boosting his confidence
accordingly:

. Saarikoski’s oral skills in English were notoriously poor, and at least one of his wives had
been known to interpret his public speeches (Hosiaisluoma 1998: 115).
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

Vahinko ettei Linkomies enää elä. Se haukkuisi minun käännökseni vielä pahem-
min kuin Mannisen, ja minä saisin tilaisuuden iskeä takaisin arvoistani vastusta-
jaa, eikä tarvitsisi nieleskellä jonkun Päivö Oksalan latteita nälväisyjä.  (p. 98)
It is a shame Linkomies [professor of Latin literature] is no longer alive. He would
lambaste my translation even more severely than Manninen’s, and I would have
a chance to battle an adversary worthy of me, rather than suffering the mediocre
naggings of some Päivö Oksala [professor and translator of antique literature].

In spite of the defiant tones in some of the entries – and, one might add, because
of them – Saarikoski’s need for external validation is evident in the diaries. He
yearned for praise from those in an authority position, although he himself was
known for using his own position for ruthlessly slaying other translators’ work
(e.g., Hosiaisluoma 1998: 113).
Haavikon pitäisi tulla käymään. … Ehkä se sanoo jonkun tunnustuksen sanan
Christy Brownin käännöksestä; yritän tietysti kiristää.  (p. 66)
We are waiting for Haavikko [Saarikoski’s publisher] to pop in. … Maybe he’ll say
a few words of praise about the translation of Christy Brown; I’ll try to squeeze
them out of him of course.

A number of entries also indicate a troubled relationship with another authority

figure – his father – and his sense of failure in the eyes of the father.
Vaikka olenhan minä töitä tehnyt. Mutta kun siitä ei tule hyvä mieli ja tyytyväinen
olo. Mikä se on mikä aina estää minua, kuin pallo nilkassa? Öisin näen unia joissa
isä halveksii minua, viime yönä kävi niin että minun piti huutaa isää pelastamaan
minut suonsilmästä johon olin pudonnut, mutta selvisin sieltä ennen kuin hän
ehti paikalle; mutta sitten en saanut mistään kuivia vaatteita mennäkseni yliopis-
tolle jossa opiskelen "kääntämistiedettä", ja isä sanoi että tuleekohan niistä sinun
luvuistasi yhtään mitään.  (p. 55)
I have indeed worked. But it does not make me feel good and satisfied. What is it
that always stops me like an iron ball tied to my ankle? At night I dream about my
dad despising me, last night I had to call out for him to come and save me from
a bog, but I managed to get out myself before he arrived; but then I did not find
dry clothes anywhere so that I could have gone to the university, where I studied
“translation science”,16 and dad said I wonder if your studies ever amount to any-
thing. (p. 55)

. In the dream, that is. In the 1970s, there was no university-level “translation science” in
Finland.
 Translation and Affect

Saarikoski came from an educated and sophisticated, upper middle-class fam-

ily. Although he promoted an aesthetics based on the contemporary vernacular
and favoured the left-wing politics of the working class, he was not a man of
the streets (Hosiaisluoma 1998). Perhaps in anticipation of difficulties in gaining
recognition from the academia and the cultural elite, he stated that he did not
even want it anyways, and that he rather sought popular acclaim. In the diary
he repeatedly expressed a worry about his public image, using the metaphor of a
“fallen star”:
Minun pitäisi saada tunnustusta kansalta; asiantuntijoiden kiitos maistuu
paskalta.  (p. 120)
I should get recognition from the people; the praise of the experts tastes like shit.
Mitähän minusta puhutaan? Että olen sammunut tähti? (p. 72)
I wonder what people talk about me. That I am a fallen star?
Ehkä Odysseian suomennos lopultakin lopettaa sellaiset puheet että minä olen
pelkkä juoppo ja sammunut tähti. (p. 85)
Maybe the Homer translation will finally stop the talk about me being just a
drunkard and a fallen star.

The Finnish star metaphor uses the verb sammua, which has both the meaning of
‘pass out’ and ‘to be extinguished’. As this citation makes explicit, in Saarikoski’s
case the two meanings are intertwined. The diaries were written by an acclaimed
albeit controversial translator whom many place among the greatest Finnish lit-
erary translators of all time, but they were also written by a long-time alcoholic
increasingly affected by the illness that would later kill him at the age of 45. The
diaries contain numerous reports of the daily dosages and how they oiled his sys-
tem and enabled his translation work:
145 säettä, ja siihen lopetan tältä päivältä. … Konjakkipullo teki hyvää, tänään
olen ollut rauhallinen ja hyvässä työvireessä. (p. 37)
145 stanzas, and that’s it for today. … The bottle of cognac did me good, I have
been peaceful and had a good flow today.

Interpreting the entries on alcohol use, I do not sense either shame or pride in
them. They rather appear as factual statements of cause and effect, reporting what
was consumed and how satisfied the author was over the effect on the workflow,
much like an annotation of the chemical state of the body, kept in order to main-
tain affective states conducive to translating. This factor, and its effects in the dia-
ries on the one hand, and in the affects he felt and expressed on the other hand,
need to be kept in mind in the analysis.
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

The above discussion of the affective stances towards the translator himself
and his expressions of self-confidence can be summarized by one term: the impos-
tor syndrome.17 It is a popular-psychology shorthand for discussing a bundle of
affects such as an internalized fear of success, anticipation of potential shame,
self-doubt, the persistent anxiety over failing and being discovered a fake, and the
anguish of fraudulence (Vergauwe et al. 2015). In the competitive high-achieve-
ment environment of the university of today, the impostor syndrome is a well-
known condition. It is not widely discussed in the academic literature of the field
of translation studies, but it is easy to recognize it as a pathology that may also
threaten translators. I do not assume it to be related to literary translators only, let
alone only those translating classics that will be reviewed by highly critical aca-
demic readers. In fact, business translators may be even more at risk as they need
to develop a skill of grasping the contents and communication styles of many dif-
ferent professional fields and communities of practice, and while they will natu-
rally develop a translation-oriented expertise in any area they repeatedly work in,
initially they may know very little and need to learn fast. This is fertile breeding
ground for impostor symptoms. Indeed, I have myself repeated the adage “fake it
until you make it” to more than one cohort of trainee translators in an attempt to
prepare them for the psychological strain of performing with less than optimal
situated knowledge. As the case of Saarikoski exemplifies, this is not only an issue
novices need to keep an eye on, as no degree of achievement, acclaim or expertise
seems to shelter you from nagging self-doubt:
Kun istuin kivellä talon takana räkimässä, tunsin itseni surkeaksi ja mitättömäk-
si, mitään en ollut saanut aikaan enkä saisi. (p. 47)
As I was sitting on a stone behind the cabin, spitting, I felt I was a sad loser, I had
not achieved anything in my life, and neither would I.

The impostor syndrome is often seen as related to gender and race; this achieve-
ment anxiety has often been connected to marginalized groups and seen as a
feminine trait (Simmons 2016). As the case of Saarikoski implies, also those in
a privileged position can suffer from it. Saarikoski was not a typical translator,
but his anxieties are recognisable as worries translators might typically entertain.
His confidence faltered in a number of areas: he was unsure about his language
skills, cultural knowledge and the level of his learnedness; he was nervous about
the critical reception of his translation work and even more worried about not

. In literature, it is also often called the “impostor phenomenon”. While I recognize the
folk psychological overtunes of the term syndrome, I prefer to use it to signal its link to the
malaises of translation.
 Translation and Affect

getting any feedback and recognition at all. In the diaries he did not express doubts
about his ability to interpret the literary qualities of the source texts nor about his
abilities to use the target language creatively to express these in Finnish. This, we
may hypothesize, may differentiate him from many other translators. Target lan-
guage anxiety is likely to be more dominant in translators working into their L2
(linked to foreign-language anxiety in general); and anxieties over interpretative
skills might prove to be more prominent in those literary translators who are not
also published authors.

4.3 Work engagement and the desire to translate

Saarikoski’s faltering self-confidence evident across the diaries and discussed in

the previous section raises questions about the desirability of translation work.
What is the motivation that keeps the translator going amidst all the doubts? Is
translation work also rewarding, and if so, how? The themes of absorption in work
(the positive feeling of being fully engaged in your work, or a feeling of flow) and
general satisfaction with translation work (beyond the assignment at hand) may
provide some answers. They seem to signal the two faces of work engagement,
the momentary (absorption) and the permanent (general satisfaction). Work
engagement is a concept in the psychology of work referring to a persistent, posi-
tive affective motivational state and a feeling of fulfilment at work, consisting of
vigour, dedication and absorption (Schaufeli et al. 2002: 74). It has been studied
from the point of view of permanent dispositions (i.e., general job satisfaction)
and from the perspective of daily fluctuations (i.e., more temporary feelings of
flow). An interesting detail in comparison to my dataset is that the daily change-
ability of engagement has been studied through diary research (Sonnentag 2003).
In their seminal article, Schaufeli et al. (ibid.: 73) place engagement as the antipode
of burnout and define it as follows: “Engaged employees have a sense of energetic
and effective connection with their work activities and they see themselves as able
to deal completely with the demands of their job.” As discussed in the previous
section, in the current data, the antipode is less explicitly that of burnout than the
issue of self-doubt.
Entries related to work engagement figure extensively in Saarikoski’s diaries.
If we count together propositions classified into the two categories of absorption
in work and general satisfaction with translation work, this combined category
of work engagement was the most frequent theme together with self-esteem dis-
cussed in the previous section. In the data, general satisfaction with translation
work received 16 comments (8 positive ones, 7 negatives and 1 ambivalent), and
items related to absorption in work occurred 14 times, and positive and ambiva-
lent affects (6+3) outnumbered the negative ones (5).
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

It can be considered significant that both themes were mentioned more

often with reference to positive than to negative affects. Translation is a pas-
time for Saarikoski, resorted to on Sundays to avoid boredom, but it is also
a source of happiness. Positive feelings of flow with respect to the on-going
translation task are far from ecstatic, however. On the other hand, negative
affects are not overly extreme either. The recurrent topos is that of tiresomeness
(‘jaksaminen’): entries report how translation work has exhausted the transla-
tor. These affects are, however, only temporary, and only refer to the day’s work
or passing bodily feelings. In general, the pull of translation is strong enough to
keep the translator in its grip:
Aamuinen mielenmasennus on mennyt, työ on sujunut hyvin, eikä minulla ole
mitään pelättävää. (p. 47)
The depression of this morning has been subdued, [translation] work goes
smoothly, and I have nothing to fear.
Mitä tekisin kun on vapaapäivä? Käännän muutaman säkeen huvikseni. (p. 66)
What would I do now that I have a day off? I’ll translate a couple of stanzas just
for fun.

Entries reflecting on translation work in more general terms are more explicitly
positive than the ones commenting on the flow of the work at hand. The category
satisfaction with translation work contains more entries (8) with positive affects
than those with negative ones (6), and the valence of the vocabulary referring to
translation is clearly positive in its appraisal, talking about happiness, pleasure, feel-
ing good, and meaningfulness.
Jos kaikki menee niin kuin toivon, ensi kesästä tulee hirvittävän raskas ja hirvit-
tävän onnellinen, kun rupean tekemään raakakäännöksestä runoa. (p. 98)
If everything goes according to my wishes, next summer will be awfully tiresome
and awfully happy as I will begin to turn my raw translation into poetry.

References to the harmoniousness of cottage life, and the role of translation work
in creating this idyllic atmosphere, reminds one of the pastoral in literature. Pasto-
ral writing has a long and varied history both as a formal genre and as a thematic
feature. Originally songs or poems about shepherds with their herds, the pastoral
is typically associated with idyllic landscape settings, elevated simplicity of rustic
rural life and harmonious atmospheres (Alpers 1996). In Saarikoski’s diaries the
translator, on a par with shepherds in terms of low status and regular tasks (ibid.:
27), is set in a rural and rustic landscape of the traditional Finnish summer cot-
tage, creating a perfect fit between the “landscape” and the “shepherd”, and ideal
conditions for the simple and harmonious task of working on the translation, sen-
tence by sentence.
 Translation and Affect

Lämmitin kammarini ja nyt täällä on hyvä olla, istua ja kuunnella veden tip-
pumista, etsiä sanoja Liddell-Scottista, kääntää Homerosta rauhallisesti, lause
lauseelta. (p. 15)
I warmed up the cabin and it now feels good to be here, to sit and listen to the
rain, to search for words in Liddell-Scott, to take my time in translating Homer
peacefully, sentence by sentence.

We must keep in mind that these diaries were written by a modern author whom
we can assume to have been well aware of the trope of the pastoral in literary
history. Throughout the text, the imagery of mushroom-picking, the sauna and
bonfire nights and other countryside joys is implicitly – and occasionally also
explicitly – contrasted with the author’s normal urban life, and while the protago-
nist stays at the cottage, other people are reported to go to town or come from
there, as constant reminders of the temporariness of the retreat. This can be seen
as a strategic artistic design in an autobiographical text written for publication.
But it is tempting to also interpret it, as pastorals have often been interpreted,
as a representation of a state of mind (cf. Alpers 1996: 22). Seen in this manner,
the diaries reflect the pleasure of translation as a constant that creates a soothing
repetitive tempo to the summer days at the cottage and provides intellectual chal-
lenge amidst an otherwise blissfully uneventful life.
Many literary translators are also publishing authors. So was Saarikoski. This
dual identity causes some affective entanglements of its own, and they surface
repeatedly in his diaries. Alongside the idyllic harmony and tolerable temporary
miseries of translation, he processes the much more agonizing worries of not writ-
ing his own texts. In contrast to writing, translating feels easier. The steady prog-
ress of the work gives him a soothing sense of accomplishment, and the entries
document this progress by accounting daily translation dosages as well as accu-
mulating results, both of the work at hand and throughout his career. Listings of
published translations and references to completed translations provide the author
with a sense of comfort amidst a writer’s block that persists through the material
under study.

Ei siitä novellista taida mitään tulla. … Mutta ehkä minä sittenkin elän ja toimin
johdonmukaisesti, siis toteutan itseäni, hautautuessani pariksi vuodeksi Homer-
oksen alle. (p. 54)
The short story is not going to take shape, I think. … But perhaps I do in fact live
and work consistently, that is, perhaps I fulfil my aspirations, by drowning myself
under Homer for a couple of years.

Saarikoski’s affective stance towards translation is characterized by mood swings.

One day’s modest happiness gives way to almost aggressive antipathy the following
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

day. The yearning to write both posits translation as a rewarding compensation

and gives it the role of a second choice. Even when translation is going smoothly
(apparently all the time; in spite of his constant depressive worries Saarikoski
never reports serious shortcomings or doubts about the translation in the material
analysed here), the joy it gives is tainted by the misery of knowing that while he is
translating, he is still not writing.

Nukuin kai liian vähän, koska tänään olen ollut haluton ja hermostunut. Homeros
sujuu kyllä, ei siinä mitään, mutta haluaisin tehdä muuta, kirjoittaa runoja taas.
 (p. 12)
I guess I slept too little because today I have been listless and nervous. Homer is
going well enough, but that is not what I want to do; I would like to write poems
again.
En minä pelkällä suomentamisella elä, tarkoitan saa tyydytystä. (p. 109)
I cannot live on translation only, I mean, I cannot get satisfaction.

While translation is clearly a compensatory task for Saarikoski, it, and the
accompanying identity of a translator, is also affectively desirable in itself, and it
would be a mistake to assume it was only a way of earning a living, let alone easy
money. Saarikoski acknowledges the difficulties involved in translation, but also
contemplates its societal recognition as demonstrated by the modest monetary
rewards.
Työ kuin työ. Tärkeämpää kuin työstä saatu raha on siitä saatu arvostus. Tienai-
sin paremmin kirjoittamalla Hymyyn kuin kääntämällä Homerosta, mutta mitä
minä Hymyn rahoilla tekisin? (p. 100)
Any work is fine. Recognition is a more important reward for work than money.
I would make more money by writing to Hymy [a popular gossip magazine] than
by translating Homer, but what would I need Hymy’s money for?
Se on vaikeata työtä, se vaatii suurta lahjakkuutta, mutta miksi siitä pitäisi mak-
saa? (p. 119)
[Translation] is difficult work, it requires great talent, but why should anyone pay
for it?

Translators’ habitus, that is, their internalized professional identity, has been the
subject of a growing body of research in translation studies (see Vorderobermeier
2014). The question of low remuneration has been seen as evidence of their sub-
servience – a claim famously proposed by Daniel Simeoni in his seminal essay on
the topic in 1998 – as it indicates low negotiating power in contract negotiations
(Heino 2017). This may well be true, and the diaries also contain entries i­ ndicating
 Translation and Affect

less than optimal bargaining skills and annoyed powerlessness, as for example in
the extract below where Saarikoski is upset to find out how his fees compare to
those of another prominent translator:

Soitin Juhani Jaskarille ja sain kuulla, että hän saa käännöksistään parempia palk-
kioita kuin minä, 250 arkilta, kun minä saan vain 200. Se suututti minua tietysti.
 (p. 95)
I phoned Juhani Jaskari [another literary translator] and heard that his transla-
tion fees are higher than mine, 250 per sheet when I only get 200. That made me
angry of course.

While monetary compensation is one measure of success and position, it is clear

that literary translators also find other rewards that provide motivation for them to
continue with the task, and the case of Saarikoski points to some potential answers
as to what these might be. It can be assumed that an author-translator’s habitus is
built differently from a translator who does not also engage in their own writing,
and author-translators have more options in positioning themselves in the literary
field. These translator’s diaries, however, provide ample evidence of Saarikoski’s
primary identification as a translator, and his positive appraisal of this role and of
the translator’s task. He makes a mental note of the down sides of the occupation
such as low pay (see the citations above), and of his destiny as an ambitious trans-
lator tied by birth to a marginal linguaculture:
Minä käännän nyt Homerosta; Ulysseksen olen kääntänyt; suuremmissa
maissa riittäisi kumpikin näistä yksinään elämäntyöksi. Aina tämä sama vitutus.
 (p. 59)
I’m translating Homer now; [Joyce’s] Ulysses I have translated before; in a bigger
country either one alone would suffice for a life’s work – an issue that keeps piss-
ing me off.

The negative affects, however, are passing remarks that pale in comparison to
the more constant undercurrent of the pleasures of translation. Indeed, in spite
of the difficulties and anxieties discussed in Section 4.2, in these diaries trans-
lation clearly emerges as a satisfying source of happiness, whereas authorship is
described as a source of an agonizingly unsatisfied desire.
Kääntäminen miellyttää minua. Teen nyt kykyjeni mukaista työtä. (p. 17)
Translating pleases me. I am now working according to my abilities.

In the case of translation work, engagement can be seen to relate to what Antoine
Berman (1984: 21) labelled pulsion de traduire, desire or drive to translate. The
pleasure of translation and the desire to translate are tropes well-known in the
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

philosophy of translation. According to Paul Ricoeur, this desire to translate

stems from a desire to broaden the horizons of one’s native language, to discover
its potential. This surely is an element Saarikoski would have recognized, but the
desire also stems from the overall context of his personal life and from the activity
of translating itself.

4.4 The pains and pleasures of translation

The analysis of the most recurrent categories of affect in the data collected from
a literary translator’s diaries portrays a dualistic profession of intense self-doubt
and a deeply satisfying intellectual task. Indeed, in Saarikoski’s diaries the emerg-
ing picture of translation is bipolar; highs and lows alternate as the translation
process moves forward, and job satisfaction and commitment levels fluctuate. We
do need to keep in mind that the writer of these diaries was an alcoholic with a
history of mental problems. This undoubtedly colours the data, but I argue that
the resulting image is more likely to be an intensified than a twisted version of
more generally valid experiences, and that the impostor syndrome and trans-
lational drive are both central elements of the affective basis of the profession.
That is, they contribute to its structure of feeling, to its pervasive and persistent
collective mood.
In psychology, the impostor syndrome refers to “intense feelings of intellec-
tual fraudulence, often experienced by high-achieving individuals” (Vergauwe
et al. 2015: 565). In a fairly large-scale study across several professional fields, the
tendency to be affected by the impostor syndrome was linked to personality traits
such as self-efficacy, maladaptive perfectionism and neuroticism, and it tended to
correlate with lower job satisfaction but greater continuance commitment (ibid.).
In the case of Saarikoski, faltering job satisfaction and the related symptoms of the
impostor syndrome seem to fit this picture quite well. I also hypothesize he is not
a unique case.
The final element correlating with the impostor syndrome in Vergauwe et al.’s
study, continuance commitment, adds a twist that is more complex. It comes from a
three-part model of organizational commitment, first introduced by Natalie Allen
and John Mayer in the 1990s (Allen & Meyer 1991: 67). Continuance-committed
employees may become dissatisfied with their work but are nevertheless unwilling
to leave the organization either because of secure remunerations or because of a
lack of alternative employment and the cost associated with leaving. It contrasts
both to affective commitment, that is, wanting to stay because of identifying with
the work goals and of positive emotional attachment, and to normative commit-
ment, that is, the felt obligation to stay out of a sense of duty or of guilt for ­leaving.
 Translation and Affect

This would imply that those prone to the impostor syndrome might have a ten-
dency to feel that they must stay, as opposed to a feeling that they want to stay or
ought to stay.
This picture appears less identifiable with the case of Saarikoski discussed
above. While it is true that for an author-translator, translation assignments are
clearly linked to remuneration issues, it is equally evident that authorship also
opens up other avenues for employment, and deciding to stay with translation
is explicitly weighed against other opportunities and then chosen because of an
inner motivation to do so. The desire to translate that emerges as a central feature
of the diaries rather signals a strong affective commitment, and workaholic ten-
dencies which are considered a pathology of affective commitment are also visible.
The entries related to the desire to translate show the rewards and joys of translat-
ing that do not fit in with continuity commitment.
Methodologically, this chapter deals with narrated affect, and the nature of
that data needs to be kept in mind. Saarikoski himself also reminds the reader that
he only writes the diaries when he is too tired to translate. The emerging picture of
translation may therefore be excessively gloomy and negatively coloured.
Minun pitää yhtenään huomauttaa, että kirjoitan tähän vihkoon aina silloin kun
en jaksa kääntää, siis kun ajatukseni on väsynyt  (p. 15)
I need to keep pointing out that I write these notes when I am too tired to trans-
late, that is, when my thought is tired.

In analysing the diaries of a published author and a public figure such as ­Saarikoski,
certain amount of caution is necessary. Conflating authors’ biographies with their
artistic work is a risk literary scholars have learned to carefully avoid, and our era
of selfies and social media presence has made image-building a pastime for the
masses. The blending of biography and fiction was also a hallmark of ­Saarikoski’s
personal poetics, and he has been described as having been obsessed with reveal-
ing aspects of his personal life to the readers, particularly from the late 1960s
onwards (Ylitalo 2015: 20). The degree of constructedness and fictionality in the
“Pentti Saarikoski” of his autobiographical prose – hence, also in the diaries ana-
lysed here – needs to be taken into account, but this does not render the analysis
of his commentaries unproductive (ibid.: 11). Even though Saarikoski is in many
ways a special case, I am inclined to think that the emerging image of translation
is likely to be recognizable to many other translators as well. The potential element
of fictionality in his accounts somewhat paradoxically adds to the universality of
the emerging portrait.
I am not arguing that looking at one translator’s narrated affect we can empiri-
cally prove any affective states related to translation as either true or false, either
for that one individual or more universally. Instead, I do posit that as an ­affective
 Chapter 4. The misery and splendour of translating 

­ ractice, translation in general, and perhaps literary translation in particular, is a

p
dualistic activity, and that this duality crucially conditions how we collectively tend
to feel translation, and this “structure of feeling” is also evident in ­Saarikoski’s notes.
Structure of feeling is a term originating from Raymond ­Williams (1977: 131),
and it designates the collective affective qualities that organize bodies and condi-
tion life, the prevailing affective atmosphere (B. Anderson 2014: Chapter 5.3). In
their introduction to a collection of articles on Williams’ concept, Devika Sharma
and Frederik Tygstrup (2015: 1) underline the importance of the experiential and
describe Williams’ research agenda on the “affective infrastructure” of our lives
through the following set of questions:
What does it feel like to be in a particular situation? How do our propensities
for doing this and not that emerge? What fuels our enthusiasm or enhances our
wellbeing? How do the little things pertaining to feeling, bodily sensation, and
atmosphere inflect, even ever so slightly, the ideas we proclaim and interests we
pursue? What we arrive at here is a participants’ perspective on culture; that is,
not only what was said and done at a particular place and at a particular time, but
what it was like to be there.

These structures are often understood to refer to a particular time-space, to a

periodization of art or a generational view of artistic style. The duality of affect
in translation is more linked to structures of feeling, to a structured affective
experience, of a particular translational practice than to the particular response
of a given generation or artistic group. As such, it is not a new idea. The many
dualities of translation – such as source versus target, free versus literal – are
well-known, and many philosophers of translation have pointed out this affec-
tive duality as well. Ortega y Gasset (1937) discusses the “misery and splen-
dour” of translation; Paul Ricoeur talks about “translation’s great difficulties and
small delights” (2006: 3). In more contemporary research, this same persistent
dilemma has been investigated through empirical survey designs that aim to
uncover what keeps translators motivated and satisfied (e.g., Dam & Zethsen
2016; Heino 2017). The mental landscape of translation is beset with devastat-
ing lows but also with gentle and rewarding highs. The above analysis focusses
on an individual translator, but its ethos is cultural, not psychological. What we
are witnessing in Saarikoski’s diaries is a personal account of collectively felt dif-
ficulties and delights, and of their constant ebb and flow in the daily work of the
translator. In short, a narrative account set in time and space of what it feels like
to be engaged in a translation process.
 chapter 5

Sticky affects, affective capital and

interpreter performance

5.1 The sticky fear of betrayal

Chapter 4 charted one translator’s narrated affects during translation work, focus-
sing on his reported feelings and mapping them with a set of culturally condi-
tioned structures of feeling: the binary ways of conceptualizing translation work
in terms of pleasure and pain. These structures of feeling are mainly descriptive
observations, although they have gained affective value through wide circulation.
More normative cultural conditioning becomes visible when we move to study
attempts at controlling the work of translators and interpreters. These attempts
too, often take a binary form – known to anyone familiar with discourses on trans-
lation – between source-orientedness and target-orientedness (e.g., sourciers and
ciblistes in French; or domestication and foreignization in contemporary transla-
tion studies parlance that takes its cue from German Romanticism). In interpret-
ing, the desire to control the affective affinities of the interpreter often revolves
around notions of neutrality and impartiality.
The pervasiveness of neutrality as a structure of feeling is related to the fear
or worry over translators’ or interpreters’ excessive licence to distort the message
one way or another. The threat of them going rogue and not performing their task
according to the expectations of the other participants is an “affective fact”, to bor-
row a term Brian Massumi (2010: 54) coined to explain how pre-emptive politics
functions and how it revolves around what might have been. Fear, he describes,
is “the felt reality of the non-existent, loomingly present as the affective fact of
the matter” (italics in the original). “If we feel a threat, there was a threat”, he
continues, “[t]hreat is affectively self-causing.” In the same vein, if a communicat-
ing partner fears the interpreter might not be properly conveying their intended
meanings, this potential shortcoming becomes an affective fact in the conversa-
tion, regardless of the actual competence and performance of the interpreter in
question. The logic of affective facts rests on them being “so superlatively real”
(ibid.: 55) that they override observable, actual facts and render them irrelevant.
Things are as they are felt to be. To complicate the matter further, in the case of
 Translation and Affect

translatorial activities, observable facts on the successes or failures of translators

or interpreters are often impossible to obtain for most participants, as they may
be unable to verify and judge how the mediated style and content relates to the
source. The feeling of threat or the feeling of trust is then all there is.
Obviously, the risk of translatorial non-compliance is not entirely unfoun-
ded. Translators and interpreters have been known to sometimes fail and also
to betray. This makes the feeling of threat even more compelling and conta-
gious. Indeed, the fear of betrayal and the ensuing desire to control translatorial
activities to ensure the neutrality of the mediator is a particularly sticky affect, to
use Sara Ahmed’s (2010, 2014) concept discussed in Chapter 2. It is a recurrent
trope in translation literature, and a prototypical source of drama in fictional-
ized images of translators and interpreters. In reaction to this sticky affective
stance among their potential clients, translators and interpreters have been play-
ing the game of building trust by providing various documents that aim to put
forward the image of a neutral and unbiased mediator. These codes of conduct
aim to regulate acceptable professional performance to match and obliviate the
sticky fear. In so doing they, or to be more precise the collective associations
tasked to protect and support the profession and issuing these codes, participate
in constructing the normativity of a particular affective stance among the pro-
fessionals: performed neutrality.
In most discussions and codes, translatorial neutrality, or the middle way
between leaning too far to either the source or the target side, presents itself as the
unbiased, natural option. Friedrich Schleiermacher with his well-known wariness
towards the middle ground and the unnatural Blendlinge it breeds is a famous
exception. Neutrality, however, is not naturally occurring. As Roland Barthes,
who devoted his 1978 Collège de France lecture series to the question of the neu-
tral, reminds us, neutrality, too, is a position to be forcefully taken, rather than a
natural outcome of refraining from taking a position: “The desire for the Neutral
continually stages a paradox: as an object, the Neutral means suspension of vio-
lence; as a desire, it means violence” (Barthes 2005: 13). Barthes also maintains
that neutrality is an intense state, and that overcoming the oppositional paradigm
is hard work:

[F]or me, the Neutral doesn’t refer to “impressions” of grayness, of “neutrality,”

of indifference. The Neutral – my Neutral – can refer to intense, strong, unprec-
edented states. “To outplay the paradigm” is an ardent, burning activity.
(Barthes 2005: 7)

Also in translation, neutrality is not simply the non-choice of not choosing to

go to one of the extremes. The ardent, burning activity of outplaying the binary
paradigm of source versus target, and the codification of this activity in codes of
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

practice, is the topic of this chapter. We will look into the hard physical and affec-
tive work that is involved in the activity of performing neutrality. Neutrality is a
position implicitly or explicitly expected in translatorial encounters but often dif-
ficult if not impossible to maintain. Working against sticky mistrust by exhibiting
a neutral stance is therefore hard work, and this work is fundamentally affective by
nature. In Chapter 2, I discussed translating and interpreting as affective labour,
arguing that interpreting in particular belongs to a performative group of affective
labour, and that certain kinds of affective and bodily capital are therefore particu-
larly intensively involved. In this chapter, these are examined in more detail in the
context of public service interpreting (see also Koskinen 2018).
The word capital is not accidental here. It is usefully connectable to a large
existing body of literature on the translators’ habitus that builds on the work of
Pierre Bourdieu and discusses the triangle of field, capital and habitus in transla-
tion (see Vorderobermeier 2014). Habitus, for Bourdieu, signifies the set of atti-
tudes, mind-sets, behavioural patterns, gestures, poses and outlook that we have
internalized. Habitus is formed socially, through family ties and social circles,
inherited genes, class status, education, professional group and so on. Factors such
as these give us an ingrained and embodied understanding of what is “natural”,
“proper” and “right” (e.g., Bourdieu 1990). The habitus, in other words, is also the
source of sticky affects, of the subtle affective mechanisms directing how one is to
feel and how one is to act (Schmitz & Ahmed 2014). The term capital also works as
a reminder that in a capitalist society, innate and acquired embodied features and
affective skills and capacities can and will also be transformed into economic capi-
tal, creating an affective economy (Ahmed 2004; Ahmed 2014: 45) where features
such as race, ethnicity, language combinations and accents, educational back-
ground, age and gender place participants on unequal footing affectively, socially
and economically (see also Piller 2013).

5.2 Doing being an interpreter

5.2.1 Performance as doing being

Translating and interpreting are activities performed professionally. In English,
the double entendre of performance comes in handy: it means both performing a
show and the action of performing a task or function. In interpreting literature,
it typically refers to the latter; here, I argue that successfully completing the latter
presumes elements of the former as well. Norms of translation have occupied a
pride of place in sociologically oriented study of translation, but most research has
focused on textual norms. This focus makes sense in a text-based activity, but we
 Translation and Affect

should not overlook the more embodied elements of performing, and the norma-
tive and normalizing expectations involved. In her seminal essay on performing
gender, philosopher Judith Butler (1988: 519; italics in the original) discusses the
idea of gender as a continuous state of becoming:

[Gender] is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted

through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the styli-
zation of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which
bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illu-
sion of an abiding gendered self.

Butler’s argument is that gender is a social construct based on a tacit collective

agreement; it is not a natural fact. Interpretership is perhaps a less central cultural
fiction, but the social construction is not too different. My argument here is that
doing being an interpreter is in a similar manner a process of a stylized repetition
of acts whose continuation develops an air of endurance and stability, and that the
stylization is in many ways embodied. Being an interpreter is, in this sense, a “per-
formative accomplishment” that constitutes an identity “as a compelling illusion,
an object of belief ” (Butler 1988: 520). The formulation of doing being something
or someone originates form Harvey Sacks’ (1984) discussion of ordinariness, and
his emphasis on not simplistically taking ordinariness as ordinary but seeing the
complicated ways in which being ordinary has to be performed. The phrasing of
doing being someone or something has since been borrowed by many. I use it here
to underline that creating a successful performance of being a professional inter-
preter also requires the active doing of that being.
Performances, and the roles we play, presume an audience (Butler 1988: 520).
Also doing being an interpreter anticipates someone watching the performance.
While translators and interpreters do occasionally perform on stage (e.g., reading
their translation, or interpreting a public speaker consecutively), in most every-
day performances (Goffman 1959/1990), also at work, we are both playing along
and watching others play in collective, interactive performances of occupational
emotions. The performances expected from professionals in different subfields of
translation and interpreting are not uniform, and the particular affects they are
assumed to display vary according to the context. As discussed in Chapter 2, liter-
ary translators are often expected to love their work, their source texts and their
authors, and this profound affinity is seen to guarantee their loyalty and therefore
to safeguard the quality of their work. In contrast, interpreters are expected to
remain neutral and unaffected, and this lack of affinity is seen to guarantee their
impartiality and therefore to safeguard the quality of their work. Business transla-
tors, in turn, need to deliver their services in a reliable and efficient manner, the
quality of their work often judged by elements such as trustworthiness and timely
delivery.
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

If we accept the view of doing being an interpreter as affective labour (as

defined in Chapter 2 above), it is logical to assume that possessing or accumulat-
ing suitable affective capital will boost your career. This argument is similar to
that put forward by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson (2018): her book on translation
and emotion is built on the premise that emotional intelligence helps translators
perform better. To translate this into the parlance of the present chapter, emotional
intelligence is one form of affective capital. In any field of practice, varying expec-
tations directed at one’s (performances of) emotional stages can feel daunting, and
may lead to a sense of inauthenticity or acting, which in turn has been seen as lead-
ing to a feeling of a fragmented self and further to stress, demotivation, depres-
sion, absenteeism and turnover (Salmela 2009). Emotional intelligence allows
one to regulate and control these negative impulses created by the performance
itself (Hubscher-Davidson 2018: 24). At the same time, theorists such as Goff-
man or Butler would not readily accept the idea of there being an “authentic self ”
to betray. Their theoretical understanding is built on the idea that identities are
always already performed, both frontstage and backstage (Goffman 1959/1990).
Instead of any elusive notions of authenticity, they might urge us to focus on how
convincing a performance is. Identities are also always already collective rather
than individual, and the performances we participate in are collectively scripted.
The innate skills of any one individual (such as emotional intelligence) are, there-
fore, only one aspect of affective capital. Performances, and accepted displays of
capital within them, are constrained by collective social orders and complex sets of
values attached to different forms of capital. Norms, expectations and hierarchies
of power come into play.
While the argument in this book is that all translating and interpreting can be
conceptualized as affective labour, this chapter focuses on public service interpret-
ers as an extreme case. Their occupational performances are laden with affective
expectations, and issues of norms, expectations and hierarchies are much more
openly visible than in many other forms of translating and interpreting. This sub-
field therefore allows us to see clearly how affective and bodily capital function in
mediated communication. Embodiment is a natural element of interpreting.18 In
spite of the recent rise of remote modes such as telephone and video interpret-
ing, prototypical interpreted interaction puts all actors’ bodies in close proximity.
Hence, the body of the interpreter is very much part of the performance, bringing
the issue of bodily capital in sharp relief. In face-to-face interaction trust is not
only built verbally but also through numerous embodied and affective means that
allow the interpreter to signal convincing professionality. Translating, in compari-
son, is much more bodiless. Although the translating body is no less engaged in

. Embodiment is even more pronounced in sign language interpreting.

 Translation and Affect

the act of translating than the body of the interpreter in interpreting, the transla-
tor’s body is typically outside the visual, aural and haptic reach of the user of the
translation. Similarly, for translators, the audience is more distant and deferred,
whereas interpreters perform a demanding cognitive task instantaneously and in
front of a live audience.
The embodied aspects of interpreting are also a reminder that our perfor-
mances are always constrained by our bodies. Precisely because interpreting (in its
non-remote modes) takes place in plain sight and in a shared space, participants
may have all kinds of expectations about the interpreter’s physical appearance and
positioning in space. These are directly linked to affects, since bodily elements
(e.g., standing too close) cause affects, and since affects are also bodily felt and
expressed (e.g., blushing). An interpreter who is skilled in identifying, interpreting
and managing the expression of their own affects and those of the communicating
partners possesses an extensive amount of affective capital, but also situationally
preferred bodily capital can be transformed into affective capital. A particular kind
of body and its normative positioning, as well as a particular kind of speech, are
favourably perceived by others and therefore create positive vibrations, supporting
the interpreter’s possibilities for a successful affective performance in doing being
a competent and trustworthy interpreter.

5.2.2 Performing impartiality

Community or public service interpreting (PSI) is arguably the most codified
branch of translating and interpreting. Statutes controlling and safeguarding
the provision of interpreting in the context of various public institutions have
been written in national and supranational law, and numerous organizations
have published their own codes of conduct for PSI (Bancroft 2005), regulat-
ing the expected behaviour of the interpreter, often in detail. One can indeed
pause for a moment to think about why this might be. A Finnish saying siitä
puhe mistä puute (‘what one is missing one talks about’) may perhaps begin to
explain it. As opposed to other branches of interpreting, PSI lacks a high profile
and professional status, and the integrity of this vocational group is constantly
at risk because of ad-hoc, volunteer and non-professional practices, widely
documented in research literature (see, e.g., Martínez-Gómez 2015). Because
languages most in demand in PSI are often not taught at university-level inter-
preter training programmes, or in any formal training outside the countries
of origin, and because other pathways to the profession do not always include
extensive training, the practitioners do not necessarily internalize particular
norms and conventions through training. The codes perform two functions at
the same time: they signal expected behaviour for those working as interpreters
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

and they present a reliable, legitimate and trustworthy front to the clients. In so
doing they participate at a collective level in doing being a professional public
service interpreter.
A number of scholars have studied various ethical codes. Some of them
have an extremely critical view. “The codes, as they stand, merely represent
the prototypical naive lay-person’s understanding, and hence expectations, of
what we do”, argue Llewellyn-Jones and Lee (2014: 146). This is quite a harsh
view, and slightly unfounded in the sense that the codes are typically drafted
by the profession, not by lay-persons, but also valid from the perspective of
the PR function of the documents (Lambert 2018): to alleviate sticky fears, the
documents need to address lay-persons’ worries. Codes of conduct also need
to be understood from the perspective of this particular genre. They are by
definition deontological; they are attempts to codify conduct (see also Dean &
Pollard 2011: 157). Or, to use Andrew Chesterman’s (1993) vocabulary, they are
a tool for transforming the “ought” to “is,” scripting the desired performance
for the actors on the stage to follow in practice. The codes therefore need to be
understood from the point of view of their transformativity: “codes are indeed
intended to transform the social context where the PSI profession exists and
they do this by pointing out elements that earn the profession trust and legiti-
macy” (Baixauli-Olmos 2017: 251).
It is often underlined that public service interpreters are commissioned for
the benefit of both communicating partners. While this is true, it is also neces-
sary to remember that the stakes are not the same for them both. It is typically
the non-professional client for whom trust is most acute and personal, as they
are relatively powerless in the situation and need to trust their personal matters
(such as health issues, immigration status and legal liabilities), in the hands of the
mediating participant. British sociologists Rosalind Edwards, Claire A ­ lexander
and Bogusia Temple (2006) have analysed the accounts of people with limited
English who need to rely on interpreting, examining the contingent and situa-
tion-specific processes of actively doing trust in interpreted encounters. Their
article is a sobering reminder of the risk always inherent in trust, as trust is only
needed when we lack certainty. A sense of familiarity shortens the leap of faith
required to trust. A number of case stories recounted by Edwards et al. illustrate
the perceived affective benefits of relying on one’s friends and family members
as interpreters: loyalty, understanding, continuity and commitment. Professional
interpreters are not felt to offer similar emotional support. On the other hand,
confidentiality issues are acknowledged as a problem in too-close circles, creating
a double bind of familiarity and trust. To overcome this double bind and to create
an affective economy more favourable to using professional interpreters, “a glim-
mer of familiarity” (para. 2.4) would also be needed in p­ rofessionally interpreted
 Translation and Affect

contexts. The structured practicalities of workflow and commissions do not nec-

essarily support the affective bonding between clients and interpreters created by
repeated contacts, and the clients will simply have to decide to actively trust the
interpreter at hand. To quote Jie Chan, one of the interviewees of Edwards et al.
(para. 6.10):
I am telling you one thing. I have been to hospital many times but the interpreter
is a different person every time. They do not know my situation, they do not
know what disease I have. Even if I met an interpreter who I had met before, they
would not remember me. The reason is that they go to different hospitals every
day and work for many people, they cannot remember each individual. I’ve been
to hospital more than ten times and there is only one interpreter who has worked
for me twice. So it is impossible to make them friends – I have to trust the inter-
preter [when I don’t know them], there is nothing I can do.

The glimmer of familiarity the client might find reassuring may be precisely what
the professional interpreter – and the coordinator organizing the gigs – may wish
to avoid. Too close a tie to one of the communicating partners could easily be seen
to compromise impartiality. And doing being impartial is a fundamental element
of doing being a professional interpreter. This is why impartiality is also enshrined
in professional codes of conduct (Baixauli-Olmos 2017: 259), alongside with more
or less detailed practical advice on how one should do being an impartial medi-
ator. In the Finnish code, for example,19 affects are linked to impartiality in an
explicitly negative manner. Section 7 of the code runs as follows: “The interpreter
shall be an impartial mediator of the message and shall not allow personal feel-
ings, attitudes and opinions to affect his or her performance.” In the more detailed
instructions this imperative of not allowing feelings to affect one’s performance is
discussed in more detail:
Impartiality means that interpreters’ personal opinions and attitudes do not affect
the quality of their work. If matters coming to light during the course of interpre-
tation are against the interpreter’s own ethics or morals, the interpreter does not
show this by gestures, tone of voice or choice of words. (SKTL 2013b: 3)

The instructions indeed emphasize the performativity of impartiality. The mat-

ters may well be contrary to the interpreter’s own beliefs and values, and the

. The Finnish code of conduct for public service interpreters (SKTL 2013a) consists of
twelve numbered sections or principles that have been translated into numerous languages,
including English, but the more detailed application guidelines (SKTL 2013b) have only been
published in Finnish and are cited below in my own translation.
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

i­nterpreter’s affective stance therefore non-neutral, but the interpreter’s perfor-

mance is expected to remain unaffected. No matter how challenging the situation,
and no matter how complex their inner feelings, the interpreter’s external behav-
iour is not to expose any inner conundrums. Bodily reactions (gestures, tone of
voice) and verbalizations (choice of words) alike are to be controlled.
Indeed, the interpreter’s neutral position is performed through active affective
labour of controlling one’s behaviour. According to Anthony Pym (2012: 80–81),
translators’ and interpreters’ professional role is akin to a mask on their face, its
smile arousing confidence and providing shelter for the interpreter to perform
interpreting work. The metaphor of a mask functions on the bodily level, signal-
ling not only neutrality and impartiality but also the interpreter’s lack of a personal
face, that is, lack of personal values, attitudes or emotions. The interpreter is not
present in person but in a role. This is also reflected in interpreters’ professional
discourse of the “alien I”, that is, the practise of the interpreters referring to them-
selves in the third person and preserving the “I” to represent the speaker’s first-
person pronoun (Pym 2012: 63). The personal “I” of the interpreter is excluded
from the communicative situation; the interpreter is not involved in person but
only in a role. Although fieldwork-based research has shown that in actual practise,
the alien I and the interpreter’s I are used much more flexibly than the schematic
model assumes (Diriker 2004: 148), the alien I is an internationally acknowledged
performance convention in professional interpreting and will be interpreted as a
linguistic sign of professional conduct. In contrast, failing to use it will challenge
the interpreter’s competence (Määttä 2017: 197). Indeed, the alien I is an excellent
example of the discursive performance of a professional role.
The alien I also poses an affective and bodily challenge: through the use of
the first-person I, the interpreted speech, its tones and affects as well the reported
events, are internalized by the interpreter in a manner that requires the inter-
preter to actively work to distance themselves from the interaction (Bontempo &
­Malcom 2012: 112). This distancing is one central element of interpreters’ affective
labour. In some areas of interpreting – for example, court cases, asylum proce-
dures and interpreting in mental health settings – regaining one’s balance after
interpreting sessions may require extensive restorative work and can cause sig-
nificant emotional and ethical stress (Määttä 2017: 193). Embodying and internal-
izing participants’ messages through patterns of speech such as the alien I add to
the risk of vicarious trauma, especially when the interpreter’s own personal history
gets entangled with the interaction at hand. The first person I makes the boundary
between the interpreter and the interpretee porous, putting them in the position
of the victim or the perpetrator, as in the case of the interpreters at the UN Inter-
national Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:
 Translation and Affect

It is they who provided the first-person voices in these stories: “I killed,” “I raped,”
“I was raped”, “I slaughtered”, “I beat”, “I was stabbed,” “I was abused,” “I was
beaten”, “my child was hacked into pieces”, “my mother was buried alive”, “all
my family members were killed”. Repeatedly, the interpreters listened, visualised,
analysed, understood and re-expressed what they heard, [becoming] one of the
victims, feeling everything they narrated. (Ndongo-Keller 2015: 337)

To gain shelter from the risk of emotional overload, interpreters can prepare by
putting on the mask of professionalism, creating a distance between their own self
and whatever emotional upheavals they may encounter in the professional con-
text. The role can be conceptualized as a coat that one is wise to put on beforehand,
just in case:
I do that [psych myself up in advance] to prepare for anything, if I do not know
what to expect. If everything turns out to be fine, I can give it up once I am there.
But in a way I will then already have my professional cover in place in case I need
it. If you simply went there with your coat wide open20 and then you needed to
start putting on the professional role on the spot while already feeling like this is
awful and like how can this have happened, or I cannot stand this smell or what-
ever, so it would be much more difficult.
 (“Maria” in Viljanmaa 2018: 129; my translation)

Intrapersonally, the mask is an emotional process of creating an inner buffer

between oneself and any potentially upsetting elements that may arise. Interper-
sonally, the mask of professionalism is produced in a bodily manner, by using – or
rather, refraining from using – gestures, mimics and voice. As we saw above, the
requirement to hide one’s affects is the dominant principle concerning affects in
interpreting. It follows that the ability to manage one’s gestures and facial expres-
sions, and to control the external visibility of one’s internal states of mind is typi-
cally considered to give the interpreter bodily and, by extension, affective capital
that supports performing being a professional interpreter. This may well be true,
but the situation is more complex. Goffman’s concept of facework has been applied
to interpreting since Cecilia Wadensjö’s classic treatise (1998), and it, too, is often
considered an essential aspect of successful interpreting. An interesting ques-
tion concerns the mutual applicability of the idea of mask and facework: can a

. This is a literal translation of a common Finnish saying of coming into a situation takki
auki which I wanted to preserve because of the reference to coat. The saying denotes reckless
boldness and unpreparedness; in this citation it keeps that idea but also connects to profes-
sional cover and mask, indicating that you leave yourself emotionally vulnerable if you come
to the assignment with your coat wide open.
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

participant who is required to use a mask also be required to do facework? And is

it possible to do so?
The mask is expected to be affectless, but it cannot be impenetrable. Even if
we expect the interpreter to hide their own attitudes and value judgements, in
the communicative situation participants’ gestures and facial expressions control
interaction in a multitude of fine-tuned ways (Matsumoto et al. 2010: 212, 224),
and the interpreter needs to employ many of them to be able to perform their
function, both strategically using their own expressions, and interpreting and
adequately responding to those of other participants. The direction of gaze, for
example, has been found to be a significant resource for interpreters in managing
turn-taking (Mason 2012). Some expressions related to particular core emotions
have been found to be universal (Matsumoto et al. 2010: 214, 223), and one can
consider these to fall outside the interpreter’s remit to verbalize them in face-to-
face interaction, as participants can themselves observe and interpret them. But
others are more culture-specific, and misinterpreting or overlooking them may
lead to communicative dysfunctions. Although interpreting is prototypically
understood as the reverbalization and mediation of verbalized content, bodily ele-
ments such as positioning, posture, gestures and facial expressions are also modes
of communication, and they also contribute to producing the actual content of
what is being communicated, either enhancing or contradicting the verbal mode.
The ability to adequately read and mediate non-verbal communication and to
wisely employ these modes in their own communication are therefore an integral
part of interpreters’ bodily capital.
To the extent that gestures and facial expressions are voluntary, interpreters
can be expected to learn the tricks of the affective labour required to control
them. Once we also take into account the involuntary microexpressions that are
also known to communicate emotions, the picture becomes more complicated.
The codified expectations expect interpreters to hide their moral and ethical
conundrums, but research has shown that the involuntary “leakages” of micro-
expressions and body language are particularly likely to happen in situations
where the emotional and cognitive load is heavy (Ekman 2009: 120). Interpret-
ing always entails a significant cognitive load, and once this is accompanied by
an affective or ethical load which is bound to be significant in many of the situ-
ations where the interpreter finds themselves party of (such as juridical proce-
dures, crisis situations, treatment for trauma), leakages of microexpressions may
be impossible to avoid.
In case of strong emotions, it may also be difficult to control one’s tone of
voice. For example, the prosodies of anger and sadness are quite distinct and rec-
ognizable, and they are interpreted largely intuitively and at least partly autono-
mously from the semantic content of the utterance (Paulmann et al. 2011). It is
 Translation and Affect

fair to assume that an ethically challenging situation might easily lead to feelings
of anger or sadness, and in that case their effects on the tone of voice may well be
beyond the interpreter’s control. Similarly, smiling and laughter are recognizable
in the voice. Some situations may be affectively taxing in ways that result in the
interpreter bursting into tears. This reaction is likely to be impossible to hide from
the interlocutors.

5.2.3 Accuracy and affect

Affects are, of course, also verbalizable and verbally transmitted. The above-quoted
Section 7 of the Finnish code prohibits interpreters from betraying their affects
in their choice of words. The expectation is that they will always only convey
the speaker’s affects, and that these are conveyed accurately. Indeed, accuracy is
another constant element in interpreters’ codes of ethics. Section 6 in the ­Finnish
code is devoted to accuracy, focusing on transmitting the content in full. What
accuracy is and what constitutes full transmission is a matter of greater complexity
than codification allows. Although not necessarily meant as such, the emphasis on
accuracy can be understood as signalling a preference for word-for-word, verba-
tim interpretations. This is also what many lay people expect from the interpreter.
However, research has shown that accuracy is an elusive concept in interpreting
(Isolahti 2014) and that practice often deviates from codified and hence norma-
tive behaviour, for example, through additions and expansions that trained and
qualified interpreters tend to make more than their less-qualified and non-trained
colleagues. Sabine Braun (2017: 167) reports on a number of studies attesting to
the affective relevance of additions and expansions. They are seen to protect the
interpreter’s or the client’s face, to both promote and to reduce empowerment,
depending on the case, and to enhance empathy, cooperation and trust. While
senior professionals may well tacitly acknowledge that expectations of accuracy
are always relative, novice interpreters may understand the norm quite literally,
and consequently end up producing overly verbatim and therefore less than ade-
quate interpretations (Mäntyranta 2018).
Because of the codified expectation of accuracy, excessive literalness can also be
used to undermine a speaker. It is well-known that norms of politeness, contextual-
ized expectations of proper interaction and also cultural rules of affect expression
may differ significantly between languages and cultures. An affectively accurate
interpretation may therefore require a departure from a verbatim approach, and
a word-for-word interpretation may well lead to misunderstandings. Because a lit-
eral rendering presents itself as a low risk option for interpreters, the interpreter
can tacitly exercise power in a morally taxing situation, while ostensibly following
the code. This can be achieved by representing the talk of the interlocutor towards
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

whom the interpreter harbours negative affects in its “raw” form, without adjust-
ments based on language and culture-specific norms of interaction. Literal transla-
tions of affectively laden expressions such as insults and swearwords, for example,
are known to result in radically altered levels of insult in the target language, and
translators are therefore known to actively down-modulate the levels of affect in
their translation solutions (Hjort 2009). The norm of literalness allows the inter-
preter to undermine the speaker’s credibility from the cover of the code by adopt-
ing a strategy of excessive literalness: if challenged, the interpreter can argue that
the interpretation was accurate, as the speaker’s exact word choices were respected.
This approach also finds support in the application guidelines of the Finnish code:
“The interpreter is not responsible for the normative behaviour of the participants
and does not, for example, adapt the interpreted message according to expecta-
tions” (SKTL 2013b: 3). The guidelines mean to say, “don’t shoot the messenger,”
(cf. Pym 2012, Chapter 2), and rightly so. However, they also absolve the interpreter
from the burden of matching cultural norms of acceptable and appreciated behav-
iour, and they create a loophole for doing harm, intentionally or unintentionally,
while appearing to maintain the professional standard.

5.2.4 Prohibition of empathy

The Finnish code is among those who are quite explicit in restricting the role of the
interpreter to interpreting only. Section 8 of the code stipulates that the interpreter
“shall not act as an assistant or advocate for those being interpreted and shall not
be obliged to discharge any duties other than interpreting during the assignment”
(SKTL 2013a). The application document adds even more explicit boundaries to
the interpreter’s tasks during and around the assignment:
During the assignment, the interpreter shall not assume any other tasks beyond
the interpreting task the assignment requires, and shall not, either before, during
or after interpreting, give participants any advice or guidance in the matter at
hand or discuss the issues brought up in the interpreting. The assignment of the
interpreter only consists of the interpreting task in accordance with the interpret-
ing method in use. (SKTL 2013b: 3)

This restriction signals that a successful performance of the role of a competent

professional interpreter involves abstaining from any tasks other than “the inter-
preting task in accordance with the interpreting method in use”. The code allows
interpreters to draw professional boundaries and shelters them from assuming
responsibilities and liabilities they are not expected to shoulder, or from stepping
into areas that are restricted to authorized officials. In so doing it also protects the
interpreters from situations where they might be perceived as personally attached
to one of the communicating partners.
 Translation and Affect

While it is in the interest of all parties that the interpreter does not assume the
role of the doctor or the lawyer, offering professional advice or providing a diagno-
sis, the codification of accuracy, non-advice and non-guidance is more problem-
atic with regard to one element of interpreters’ competence: cultural knowledge
and intercultural competence. In research literature and in self-concepts as well,
translators and interpreters are typically seen as experts in these areas, but it is a
matter of considerable debate whether cultural mediation is seen as an entirely
separate job description, an integral part of interpreting or something in between.
While codes reflect this spectrum of possible understandings, the majority seems
to favour prohibitive coding (Wang 2017). This begs the question of how and where
interpreters can benefit from and capitalize on their intercultural competence.
Intercultural competence is largely about affects: empathy, position-taking and
anxiety management are essential elements of intercultural competence (­Bennett
2009; see also Tomozeiu et al. 2016: 261–262). Empathy, the ability to be sensi-
tive to and to understand the feelings, thoughts, and past and present experiences
of another allows the interpreter to alleviate potential communication problems.
Cultural empathy, more specifically, allows interpreters to assess what kinds of cul-
tural explanations are needed for the communicating partners to achieve mutual
understanding. With their emphasis of accuracy and restrictions on expanding the
role of the translator, codes of conduct tend to prohibit the use of this kind of affec-
tive capital. Wang (2017) also questions whether this capital is actively built during
training. At the same time, the norm of non-partiality and the advice to abstain
from assuming the role of a cultural mediator also encourage exhibiting emotional
and bodily distance that the communicating partners may well interpret nega-
tively as non-empathic indifference rather than as displays of impartiality.
Public service interpreting takes place within institutional interaction, which
is hierarchical by nature. The participant in need of guidance and support from the
interpreter is more likely to be a recent immigrant than the representative of the
institution in question who participates in the interaction in their official capac-
ity. In this hierarchy, the interpreter’s avoidance of gesturing affinity or empathy
towards the lower-status participant in effect results in implicitly seeming to side
with the official, who, incidentally, is guided by a similar ethos of impartiality and
therefore likely to favour similar performed indifference. From the perspective of
the lower-status participant, the interpreter may be perceived as a representative
of the institution. This impression is further reinforced by the fact that interpret-
ers are often commissioned by the institution and are therefore easily seen to side
with it. In effect, avoiding explicit gestures of affinity, while aimed at maintaining
professional integrity and impartiality, may become a root cause of what the idea
was to avoid: an experience of partiality.
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

Another specificity of the interpreter’s role is that they are tasked to ensure the
success of the affective labour performed by other professionals in the communi-
cative situation. Arlie Hochschild (2003: 151) describes the labour of a doctor as
follows:
Doctors, in treating bodies, also treat feelings about bodies, and even patients
who are used to impersonal treatment often feel disappointed if the doctor
doesn’t seem to care enough. It is sometimes the doctor’s job to present alarming
information to the patient and to help the patient manage feelings about that. In
general, the doctor is trained to show a kindly, trusting concern for the patient.

On an interpreted appointment, the doctor’s possibilities of verbalizing “kindly,

trusting concern” depend on how well the interpreter mediates the affective mes-
sage in addition to the semantic content. Kind, empathetic behaviour can of course
also be expressed by means other than verbal. In an illuminating article based on
observed interpreted doctor’s appointments, Jenny Paananen and Ali Reza Majlesi
(2018), for example, report how the doctor, the interpreter and the patient co-
construct caring also through sympathizing and empathizing gestures.
Hochschild emphasizes that doctors are trained to show kindly concern. In
the codes of conduct for public service interpreters, in contrast, such concern
appears as a negative trait, and its management (i.e., making it invisible) is seen
as an important element of professional performance. Expressing empathy may
not be encouraged in the codes, but in real-life situations people, interpreters as
well as other participants, are not only performing scripted professional roles
but are also human beings, with human emotions and varied emotion man-
agement competences and personal styles of responding to emotionally laden
situations. Hochschild (2003: 148) points out that while some waitresses and
nurses perform emotional labour, others do not. Personal styles are also observ-
able among interpreters, but in addition to personal willingness and ability to
show empathy, interpreters also feel constrained by the normative expectations
attached to their role:
Normally I try to remain the person who does not do anything else but interprets
and I hope someone else will pass on the handkerchief to the client. But I do
sometimes feel that I understand the client’s situation better and know better how
to be there for them, often for example how to relate to them as one woman to
another. And I am maybe not afraid of the skin colour or reactions, or how dif-
ficult the issue is for the client.… But it often disturbs me because I fee- because I
kinda know that I am not allowed to participate in their sorrow or agitation even
if I wanted to. And then I worry that the client may think I am so cold, that I am
not at all interested, that I do not care.
 (“Sofia” in Viljanmaa 2018: p. 131; italics in the original, bold added)
 Translation and Affect

The double bind of professional distance and human compassion experienced by

Sofia and many other public service interpreters is familiar to many occupations.
What may be unique to interpreting is the implicit and explicit negative fram-
ing of empathy in normative texts such as the deontological documents discussed
in this chapter. The dilemma of combining professional impartiality with human
compassion, and the ethical stress produced by conflicting demands, is a recurrent
corollary of public service interpreting, arising from the kinds of issues dealt with
in asylum interviews, health care appointments, courtrooms and other contexts
of PSI work. The normative codification of non-empathy places the burden of this
ambivalence on the individual interpreter.

5.3 Embodied affinities and distances

Languages are not on equal footing socially, and strong and weak languages are
treated differently also in interpreting (Määttä 2017). This differentiation is vis-
ible for example in training possibilities, work opportunities, the predominance
of particular interpreting modes and differentiated remuneration practices. This
­professional hierarchy creates a hierarchy of linguistic capital. Native-speaker capac-
ity is another source of embodied linguistic capital that transforms into affective
capital in interpreted interaction. Interaction is always also about saving face. In dia-
logue interpreting, the interpreter as mediator is at the epicentre of communication,
reverbalizing everything being said by the communicating partners. The mask of
impartiality allows the interpreter to create distance to the on-going communica-
tion and to avoid assuming responsibility for the potentially face-threatening form
or content of what is being said. The risk of confusing the interpreter with the actual
speaker is likely to be greater when the communicating partners are not experienced
in using interpreters, but it is never fully absent. Conveying qualities such as inco-
herent, substandard or obscene language always pose a risk to the interpreter’s face.
This risk is greater when interpreting into a language that is not the interpreter’s
first language, as any nonstandard usage may be taken as a sign of the interpreter’s
linguistic incompetence. This risk is also greater when interpreting into the first lan-
guage of the communicating partner who represents the commissioner and is there-
fore in a position of power. From these two premises it follows that in most cases
the interpreters with an immigrant background interpreting the foreign-­language
speaker’s speech to the participant that represents the public service institution face
two simultaneous native-speaker disadvantages they cannot circumvent.
A situationally advantageous ethnic background and a matching native-
language competence are forms of inherited bodily capital. Linguistically skilled
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

immigrants can transform their competence into economic capital as PSI is a

channel to professional employment in a new country, but within the profes-
sional practice their non-nativeness (both linguistically and ethnically) places
them in a disadvantageous position. It is important to acknowledge that situ-
ationally non-optimal ethnicity can also be a risk factor in performing profes-
sionalism, and that a non-immigrant background endows an interpreter with
credibility both through ethnic and cultural affinity to the institutional partici-
pant and through native-speaker competence in the language the commission-
ing participant is best placed to assess. One could say that the PSI world orients
towards some bodies more than others, and those with whose body the world
agrees will find things easier. This is, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, how privilege
works:
In “Strange Encounters” (2000) I work about this most directly. Because I was
very interested there in the actual, the everyday way in which an individual body
moves and negotiates its relationship to space. It is how we are talking about the
constitution of spaces as being for bodies. The book that picked up the argument
most is much more “Queer Phenomenology” (2006), which begins to think that
it is not just a question of “there are bodies that have orientations towards objects
and others”, but rather that there are worlds that are orientated towards some
bodies more than others. And there are bodies that can be received, the bodies
that have the – I use the metaphor “the comfortable chair” – the chair that has
received an impression of a body that sits upon it. So the body can find it easier to
sit upon that chair. And the way in which privilege can work like that.
(Schmitz & Ahmed 2014: 100–101)

Another aspect closely linked to verbal, embodied and ethnic affinity is accent. A
high-status accent is a valuable asset both for language professionals and others
(Piller 2013: 90–91). According to Piller, accents are more valuable in case they
match the high-status local usage in the local language, are associated with (West-
ern) high-status varieties in lingua franca languages or, in immigrant languages,
assist in performing a valued form of authenticity (ibid.: 88). Ethnicity, and hence
also the capital provided by accent, is situational and changeable, as it depends on
the ethnic set-up in the communicative situation. To an extent, accent is an intrin-
sic part of one’s habitus, but a flexible repertoire of accents and an ability to adapt
to conversational requirements is a valuable form of capital (embodied physically
in the speech organs) that allows the interpreter to perform affective labour on the
level of speech features.
Accent is only one element of the interpreter’s external habitus and situational
performative competence. The Finnish guidelines for public service interpreters
also emphasize the requirement of normative behaviour and dress code:
 Translation and Affect

The interpreter is expected to act and perform in accordance with the require-
ments of each interpreted communicative situation, taking into account the pre-
vailing norms of behaviour and dressing. (SKTL 2013b: 3)

Behaving and dressing according to expectations can be seen as outer signals of

trustworthiness and neutrality, as well as ensuring that the interpreters do not
draw attention to themselves. What this embodied situational control also does,
however, is position the interpreter as someone who is familiar with the context
and competent in how to act. This, of course, is precisely the intended effect, but
it may be experienced as alienating by a communicative partner who personally
finds the situation intimidating and difficult to handle. In PSI contexts, the pub-
lic servant is by definition on their own turf, and an interpreter who dresses and
behaves in a manner resembling the public servant will unavoidably be positioned
closer to that communication participant than to the one who is only visiting. In a
sense, this creates a double bind, as in matching her behaviour to the expectations,
the interpreter can be seen to align herself with the dominant participant in the
situation, but if the interpreter does not do so, she may be viewed as suspect and
potentially incompetent by both parties.
The feeling of comfort created by matching bodily capital is transformed into
affective capital in the form of familiarity and feelings of trustworthiness. For the
public servant, interpreting adds a taxing element to the institutional process at
hand, and a feeling of familiarity with an interpreter from the same ethno-cultural
background may alleviate the experience of cultural friction (Määttä 2018; Snell-
man 2018). Ethnic similarity is, however, only one potential cause for a sense of
affinity. Snellman’s study of military interpreters, for example, shows that in this
high-risk context an interpreter recruited through the military system and thus
from a shared military culture is perceived as more reliable and easier to work with
than locally recruited interpreters regardless of the ethnic background.
Perceived affinity with one communication participant equals perceived dis-
tance from the other. Some elements of embodied capital will place the interpreter
rather unavoidably on a scale of affinity and distance. An interpreter from the same
ethnic background as the client, for example, may intimidate the representative of
the public service and cause them to be on guard because of the perceived majority
on the other side of the table. A sense of affinity may be comforting for the commu-
nicating participant, but not necessarily for the interpreter. Nor is it always desired
by the participants themselves. Too much familiarity may sometimes, for example,
in small ethnic communities, be awkward, as discussions often deal with personal
matters. In those cases, it is part of the interpreter’s affective labour to manage
distancing. This performance of adequate affinity and distance is situational, and it
can be realized through both bodily and verbal means.­Interpreters are sometimes
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

instructed to situate themselves spatially so that they are at an equal distance from
all communication partners and thus to embody the principle of neutrality also in
spatial terms. In practice, this may sometimes be impossible (Pokorn 2017), and
the pre-existing affinities as well as ethnic and cultural expectations of adequate
distances may well sometimes require balancing acts and counteractions in spatial
positioning to manage situational interpretations of affectivity and neutrality.
An extreme case of managing affective and physical distance concerns the
issues of physical contact and bodily harm. The work-related physical and psycho-
logical risks of doctors, nurses, social workers and the police are fairly well known,
but as the discourse on neutrality and the ideal of invisibility create ideas of a
distanced mediator, it is not always fully recognized that interpreters summoned
to these same situations are subject to the same risks. Interpreters often consider
remote interpreting modes such a telephone or video interpreting cumbersome, as
the technology removes the interpreter from the communicative situation, makes
the recognition and mediation of tones and nuances more difficult and cuts out
or reduces the possibility of also relying on gestural elements. A positive outcome
of remote modes, however, is the elimination of physical harm in violent contacts.
A careful choice of interpreting technique can shelter interpreters also in other
ways – for example, by opting for booth-based simultaneous interpreting over
whispered interpreting, the interpreter is not forced to have very intimate contact
with the interpretee. On other occasions, remote interpreting may be beneficial for
communication in reducing the role of ethnicity or gender of the interpreter, for
example, in situations that might otherwise be considered embarrassing for some
participants or conflictual enough to create barriers for cooperation if all parties
were placed in the same physical space.

5.4 Affective labour, codification and reflexivity

In addition to mastering the cognitive skills and language competences required

for interpreting at a professional level, training is also about learning to perform
being an interpreter at the bureaucratic and institutional stages of public services
(and elsewhere). This includes an awareness of and reflexivity about the embod-
ied and affective labour interpreters are expected to carry out to be convincing
in their role. The extent of active labour necessary for successful interpreting will
vary according to the situational bodily and affective requirements and the inter-
preter’s innate or rehearsed characteristics and abilities in fulfilling these. In a typi-
cal situation, the communicating parties are unable to fully judge elements such
as accuracy, coverage and other content-related and linguistic matters – this is
why an interpreter is needed to begin with. Because of this, the outer signals of
 Translation and Affect

professional performance easily gain dominance in judging the interpreter’s suc-

cess. Being a professional interpreter plays on a trustworthy and reliable outer
appearance; fluent delivery in the language of that partner who is in a position of
making recruiting decisions; an ethnicity that matches this partner’s expectations
and creates a desired degree of familiarity; situationally adequate gender and age;
and an accent and tone of voice that does not draw negative attention to itself.
The more interpreters are naturally endowed with this kind of bodily capital, the
less aware they may be of its role in interaction and of their own privileged posi-
tion in comparison with some other colleagues. And the converse is also true.
The more shortcomings an interpreter has in this regard, the more acutely aware
they become of the expectations and the more they need to invest active affective
labour in compensating for their lack of bodily capital in order to meet performa-
tive requirements. It seems logical to assume that this labour taxes the interpreter’s
cognitive and mental resources in ways that are detrimental to the overall quality
of the service, creating a biased spiral in the sense that the interpreter who already
is in a favourable position because of the resources of bodily capital will also be
better placed to provide a good interpretation because of being able to focus on the
cognitive task in an amicable climate.
Affective labour and affective capital are paradoxically bound together: to
be able to do affective labour one needs to have affective capital; a lack of affec-
tive capital (transformed from bodily capital or otherwise) creates the need to
compensate via affective labour. Interpreters’ professional performance revolves
around the management of affects: while they are expected to professionally medi-
ate not only the semantic content but also the emotions and affects of other par-
ticipants, they are simultaneously expected to control and contain their own. To
an extent this can be taught and learned, but researchers have also sought ways
to test applicants’ emotional profiles to be able to identify those with an emo-
tionally stable personality. These candidates might have innate skills in handling
affectively challenging commissions and managing work-related emotional stress
(Bontempo & Napier 2014).
Baixauli-Olmos (2017: 260) notes that there seems to be a narrowing of roles
ongoing, and the boundary work inscribed in the codes and the codification of
accepted performance indeed work in this direction. Hochschild (2003: 120)
raises the same issue: if training is directed at teaching pre-set behavioural patterns
instead of learning to employ one’s own situational judgement, the unintended
consequence is a deskilling of practitioners. Codification is a professionaliza-
tion project, but deskilling is surely a counterprofessionalization process. As will
be argued at length in Chapter 8, the first step to accessing one’s moral compass
is creating a sensitivity towards one’s affects, and reflexivity towards one’s own
behavioural patterns and reactions in different situations. Dean and Pollard are
 Chapter 5. Sticky affects, affective capital and interpreter performance 

critical of the deontological foundation of codes of conduct and the concomi-

tant assumption of full neutrality. Instead, they call for disciplined subjectivity. In
agreement, I quote them at length:

In pursuit of the practice professional goal of neutrality, that is, the lack of per-
sonal bias in one’s work product, the ability to distinguish between interpersonal
and intrapersonal demands is crucial. We find this process difficult for many in-
terpreters new to the concept of intrapersonal demands. This is largely because
many were trained to believe that significant personal reactions conflict with the
ethical ideal of neutrality. Thus, rather than acknowledge personal reactions as
inevitable (especially given the intense dynamics common in the practice profes-
sions), interpreters commonly discount, deny or feel conflicted about such reac-
tions (Heller et al. 1983). Yet, if one does not recognize, and then appropriately
deal with potential intrapersonal influences on one’s work, there is considerable
risk that these internal dynamics will taint one’s perception of the interpersonal
dynamics taking place in the interpreting situation (i.e., lead to projection and/
or countertransference). The frequent consequence of failing to recognize the in-
fluence of intrapersonal factors in one’s perceptions of the world is expressed in
the Talmudic saying, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are”.
Smyth (1984), in discussing this matter as it pertains to teaching, points out that
the ideal of perfect objectivity is a myth and instead encourages professionals to
strive for ‘disciplined subjectivity’. (Dean & Pollard 2011: 170)

Peter Llewellyn-Jones and Robert G. Lee (2013: 56) summarize the issues of affec-
tivity, affinity and performance through the concept of the interpreter’s role-space,
and they divide the elements of successful interaction into three categories along
similar lines to the discussion above:

[W]e propose that the interpreter’s role not be rules-based but be governed in-
stead by the “role-space” the interpreter creates and inhabits in any given situ-
ation. This “space” is determined by a range of factors that can be represented
along three main axes:
x: the axis of participant/conversational alignment (sociolinguistic and psycho-
linguistic)
y: the axis of interaction management
z: the axis of “presentation of self ”

They continue to argue that these three axes define and delimit the interpreter’s
room to manoeuvre. Optimistically, they also propose that by “plotting the inter-
preter’s anticipated/actual positioning on these three axes, we can generate a three-
dimensional shape, or space, that delineates the appropriate role-space of the
interpreter in any particular interaction” (Llewellyn-Jones & Lee 2013: 56). In the-
ory, this is no doubt true. In practice, the complexities of interaction will be likely
 Translation and Affect

to construct such a complex web of forces that it is up to the participants’ intui-

tive skills, empathy and flexibility, or their “informed reflections” (­Baixauli-Olmos
2017: 261), how successfully they are able to navigate. Dean and Pollard (2011)
discuss this same issue from the perspective of deontology and teleology, arguing
that rather than teaching future interpreters to internalize ready-made codes they
should be taught how to assess and analyse their role in different contexts from the
perspective of desired outcomes and to adapt their performance to the goals of the
communication. This may sometimes require a performance of detached neutral-
ity, at other times compassionate stepping out of the professional role to connect
more humanely.21

. It is also important to keep in mind that empathy and compassion are not a straight-
foward issue (see Chapter 8), and that detached and non-compassionate behaviour can be
seen to signal respect more than commiserating (Sennett 2004: 30 and passim.). Simplified
“if in situation x, do y” instructions would be a similar codification project and would fail in
similar ways as the current codes.
 chapter 6

Translation and the sense of space

The tropes of distance and affinity have come up repeatedly in the preceding chap-
ters. In Chapter 3 the notions of foreignization and domestication were brought
up in the context of textual relations, and their nature as degrees of distancing
was discussed. Chapter 5 focused on the relations of the interpreter’s body and
affects, in particular the ways in which the neutrality and trustworthiness of the
interpreters are being managed through codifying their affective and bodily per-
formances of appropriate, either mental or physical, affinity to the communicating
partners. Distance, affinity and neutrality are all not only affective but also spatial
concepts in the sense of positioning the translator (or interpreter) at a particular
distance from the reader and source text author with respect to other constituent
factors in the translation situation. The issue of whose side the translator is on and
where their loyalties lie may well be the most perennial question of translation.
At the heart of the above issues are questions of affect, as I hope to have shown
in the preceding chapters. But they are also questions of positioning and spatial-
ity. In this chapter, I build on Gideon Toury’s (2012: 47) postulate that cultures
allot particular positions for “translations and translators, as well as the activity of
translation as such”. Position is a spatial noun; the focus of this chapter is on the
affective dimensions of the spaces and places occupied by translators, translations
or translating.
In spite of the abundance of spatially motivated metaphors of translation
(bridge-building, overcoming language barriers, etc.), space is not often given a
prominent place in translation theories. Anthony Pym’s (2012) conceptualization
of translators as inhabitants of an intercultural space, with their loyalties directed
not to any national culture but to the community of intercultural mediators is an
interesting explicitation of the spatiality of Schleiermacher’s binary view of domes-
tication and foreignization. The flipside of Pym’s notion of an intercultural space
of and for those specifically detached from surrounding monocultures is that it
places the source and target sides as two separate entities. In so doing it differs
radically from Michael Cronin’s (2006: 68) conceptualization of the multilingual,
multi-ethnic space as first and foremost a translation space, that is, a space where
translation needs to happen for mutual comprehensibility within one shared space
 Translation and Affect

as opposed to mediation between spaces. In a translation space, the translators

and the users of translation exist in cohabitation, and the roles are reversible and
hybrid. Both Cronin’s translation space and Pym’s intercultural space have affini-
ties with Emily Apter’s concept of a translation zone, a term she (2005: 5) employs
to “imagine a broad intellectual topography”, to signal detachment from method-
ological nationalism (see also Koskinen 2015). The zone Apter envisions is a place
where translation and transnationalism interact. Intercultural spaces, translation
zones and translation spaces all assume particular kinds of inhabitants, and the
topography only becomes realized through their actions. These spaces are there-
fore also translatorial spaces, a concept derived from Holz-Mänttäri’s concept of
translatorial action and signalling a space of translation activity (Koskinen 2017).
Regardless of the terminology and theoretical underpinnings, spatial thinking
in translation studies has operated on both macro- and microlevels, giving rise to
abstract theoretical conceptualizations but also to a wealth of empirical data on
the microlevel. Michael Cronin (2012: 65) promotes analytical microspection, that
is, “the proper investigation of places and their inhabitants through methods and
practices which reveal the full, fractal complexity of human habitation.” This kind
on microspection has often been conducted in the framework of cities or towns
(Simon 2012; Cronin & Simon 2014; d’Hulst & Koskinen 2020), shifting the focus
from abstract notions of space to geographically demarcated places and highlight-
ing how the local environment and translation dialogically shape one another.
The difference between space and place this chapter builds on needs to be made
clear from the start: the leading keyword in this chapter is space, a more virtual
and more abstract notion of mental spatial arrangement; place is more directly
linked to concrete physical locations. The divisions are blurred as spaces give rise
to places and places create imagined spaces, but in the following I try to keep these
two analytically distinct: I will be discussing the virtual arrangement of translation
work (space) and its physical location (place). Both are relevant, and both contain
affective underpinnings.
In what follows I will first briefly discuss the core concepts of space and place
(Section 6.1). I will then (Section 6.2) develop the argument further by looking
into how spatiality and affect play out in three fundamentally different landscapes
of written translation: professional workplace contexts, translation embedded in
an art performance, and carnivalistic subtitling practices. These three were selected
to probe the question of space, place and affect from many perspectives. The first
of the cases is based on quite extensive research both by myself and others; the
two latter ones are more recent as objects of study, and my observations are to be
considered preliminary and tentative. Similar to all chapters in this book, I do not
claim to exhaust the topic. Instead I hope to illuminate the versatile possibilities of
further inquiry in the crossroads of affect and matters related to space and place.
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

6.1 On spaces and places

Both place and space are terms that have been extensively discussed and debated
in anthropology, sociology and human geography. This “spatial turn” in cultural
theories has produced a number of competing and complementing theories. In
this chapter I draw heavily on Doreen Massey’s theorizations of space, particu-
larly her book For Space (2005). I find her views on space both meaningful and
pragmatic (“prosaic”, in her own words; ibid.: 13) in their underlying optimism. In
what has become a standard contemporary understanding, she rejects a static and
fixed view of space, and instead posits that spaces have a number of dynamic fea-
tures (ibid.: 9). First, a space is always a product of interrelations and constituted
through interactions. Second, it is a sphere of multiplicity, plurality and heteroge-
neity. Multiplicity and space are co-constitutive: “Without space, no multiplicity;
without multiplicity, no space”, Massey says (ibid.), indicating a foundational dyna-
mism through which spaces are created. Third, because spaces are constructed by
interrelations, and because relations in turn are predicated by changeable material
practices, spaces are non-finite and changeable; with their loose ends and missing
links they are in a continuous state of becoming (ibid.: 12). Because of their lively
nature, spaces are not best understood in opposition to time, as something fixed
and stable, but together with time (ibid.: 18). Both space and place, and our affec-
tive relations to them, are entangled with time and keep on evolving.
Space is indeed a complex and mobile concept. But so is place. In Massey’s
research, space and place are difficult to fully distinguish, and both are seen as
changeable, contestable and in a constant process of becoming through interac-
tions (see also Cresswell 2001, Chapter 3). In this chapter I aim to proceed prag-
matically, adopting definitions that allow me to conceptualize translatorial spaces
and places and to make sense of my empirical data. To do so, I part ways with
Massey, keeping to her ideas of space but less so of place. Instead, I follow a distinc-
tion where place is understood as a material and meaningful location (­Cresswell
2001: 7),22 whereas space is more ephemeral and abstract. In other words, places
are cognitively constructed (as meaningful), but they are also matters of physical
reality. No matter how contestable and changeable a place is, it is still fixed in the
sense of being non-mobile or at least only in one location at one time, hence also

. Locale, in Cresswell’s vocabulary, is the most material layer of place. This is different
from Pym’s definition of the term locale in the context of localization, i.e., an emergent dis-
tinct cultural entity distinguishable by its resistance to distribution of a product in its existing
language versions (hence the concomitant need for localization) (Pym 2004: 22). To avoid
unnecessarily muddying the conceptual waters in my vocabulary, I do not make Cresswell’s
distinction.
 Translation and Affect

its connections to stationary affective concepts such as rootedness, belonging and

residence, that is, soothing ideas of identity, history and boundaries (Cresswell
2001: 59, 72). In Cresswell’s system, when a space is made meaningful by some-
one, it becomes a place (ibid.: 7). A particular place is made meaningful, whereas
a space emerges from interrelations. This kind of space is not static, and multiple
spatializations with different temporal rhythms can overlap, defining their own
spatial frame as they unfold (Harvey 2004). Admittedly, the conceptual classifi-
cation between spaces and places is not airtight, and in real life the material, the
meaningful and the relational often coexist, but the distinction seems useful for
practical purposes, especially in analysing a field such as translation where the
most relevant spatial arrangements are not necessarily materially based.
Now, if we take this to the spaces and places of translation, we will begin to see
translators and translations embedded in material, textual and human relations,
in non-deterministic contexts that allow for different positionings and outcomes
and that are constantly being renegotiated and re-moulded. The spaces of transla-
tion and translators include the cultural meanings attached to the activity and
the organization of translation work, for example, in terms of legal relations and
moral binds. The places of translation and translators consist of the actual places
of translation work, the digital or material locations where translations are pub-
lished, distributed or stored over time, and so on. The conceptual division between
space and place is not straightforward, and it is a question of emphasis whether for
example the currently dominant production networks and translation platforms
are perceived as spaces or places.
Massey (2005: 10–11) emphasizes the political nature of spaces and their
power structures; I agree, but I choose to emphasize that spaces are also affec-
tive.23 The various embedded practices that the interrelations are created by, and
the negotiations and identity construction work involved, will also shape and
be shaped by the affective energies involved. In the heterogeneity of spaces, the
political and the affective are particularly intertwined, as spatial structures create
opportunities and barriers for difference and diversity, and these are often affec-
tively based. The heterogeneity and malleability of spaces, then, makes them open
for change. This promise or threat of possibilities for new constellations, for new
connections to be made and for existing links to be cut, is inherently political, but
it is also affective. At the same time, translators and translations are also located in
particular material places, made meaningful by the actors involved in translatorial

. I do not think Massey would disagree. It seems telling that she lets us know that the
working title of her book had been “Spatial Delights” (2005: 14).
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

activities. These places will afford some courses of action and constrain others, and
they resonate with particular affects and generate particular affective responses.

6.2 Spaces and places of translation

In this section I will discuss the interplay of space, place and affect in three differ-
ent cases of translatorial practice: professional workplace contexts (Section 6.2.1),
translation embedded in an art performance (Section 6.2.2) and carnivalistic sub-
titling (Section 6.2.3). These three were selected to probe the question of space,
place and affect from several perspectives. The first case looks at the spaces and
affects of professional translators in two different organizational constellations.
Interview data of in-house translators’ workplaces (Koskinen 2008, 2009) and
of outsourced translators’ positions in virtual translation networks (Abdallah &
Koskinen 2007, 2010) are revisited with the help of an analysis of the spatial meta-
phors the interviewees employ in their talk. The same datasets have earlier given
insights into how affective stances such as a sense of belonging (Koskinen 2008),
trust (Abdallah & Koskinen 2007) or recognition (Koskinen 2009) bear on trans-
lators’ work. I will then move to the two other spheres of translational activity,
translation in the context of performative art and parody subtitling as a carni-
valesque practice. The second case moves the limelight from the translator to the
spaces of translation, and from the affective involvement of the translator to the
question of the textual relations between source and target texts as elements of an
aesthetic whole. This line of research is continued in the third case which pushes
the question of source–target relations to the extreme and forces us to question
what translation even is, whether anything occupying the place of translation can
count as a translation, and how we feel about pushing the definition of translation
to a carnivalesque extreme. At the same time, the fun parody subtitles testify to the
affective power of humour.

6.2.1 Sense of space in translation work

In the contemporary world, translation is a booming industry, refuelled by two
major forces of the turn of the millennium: globalization and digitalization.
“Information wants to be free” is a slogan often used by technology activists; the
steady rise of translation shows it surely also wants to be available multilingually.
The previous chapter looked at the affective and embodied aspects of public ser-
vice interpreting, which, even with increasingly technology-driven remote modes,
focuses on the idea of the communicating partners sharing the same place of inter-
action. In comparison, translation is a solitary occupation, and the interactions
 Translation and Affect

more delayed, more virtual and more textual in nature. Translation as a profession
is not tied to a particular physical place. But while it is true that translation work
does not require sharing an office with co-workers or face-to-face contact with
clients or readers, translators, too, will find themselves located within a network
of contacts, and with more or less need to negotiate what, how, when and why
they translate. The virtuality of contemporary translation networks, which could
be called spaces rather than places according to the current vocabulary, begs the
question of how translators and others working in these networks make meaning
of this spatial arrangement. How does it become a meaningful place and what kind
of a place is it for translators? This is the focus of the first of the three cases that I
use for surveying the spaces and places of translation in this chapter.
Professional business (in the sense of non-literary) translation is the prototyp-
ical object of most contemporary translation research. It seems fitting to begin the
analysis of spatiality from the spaces and places that are typically used to organize
this field of translation, or which emerge as a result of such organizing. These are
based on logistic, organizational and economic factors. The economy of transla-
tion, and the pros and cons of the different business models, can be discussed
and debated from many angles (Abdallah 2012; Moorkens 2017). In line with the
theme of this book, my current interest lies in the affective elements involved. I
wish to explore how translators feel about the spatial positions available to them
in these different configurations; what kinds of affective forces get into play and
which affects are prone to emerge. I am also curious to find out whether being
a translator invites some universal kinds of affects regardless of the spatial and
organizational constellation, and the section therefore contains two datasets, one
from a production network based on freelancing and the other from a high-end
in-house setting. My focus here is less on material workplaces where the networks
are being maintained than on the organizational spaces of power, hierarchies and
belonging that these networks create. Recent work on workplace ergonomics in
cognitive translation studies, and in particular on the socio-technical systems
translation work is embedded in (Ehrensberger-Dow & Massey 2017), touches
upon many similar interests. Indeed, as an overarching concept affect is one of the
points of contact between cognitive and sociocultural approaches to translation.
Methodologically, this section uses interview and focus group talk to study nar-
rated affect (Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016) with respect to mental spatial arrange-
ments, identifying representations of affect through discourse analysis. In other
words, I am looking at evidence of meaning-making in discourse, or the ways in
which participants make sense of the space they work in, finding their place in it.
Since spaces are formed through interrelations, a crucial configurating ele-
ment in them are power relations, and each space creates a particular power-
geometry (Massey 1991). Similarly, all translation spaces are networks of relations,
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

and they represent particular power-geometries which afford different actors par-
ticular positions. It makes sense to ask how it feels to participate in them. Among
questions to be asked are, for example, the following: What kinds of affective
alignments do these translation networks invite? Can we find some similarities in
the spatially induced affects of translation work irrespective of the organizational
models, or do different structures produce entirely different pains and pleasures
and senses of belonging? How does it feel to be a cog in translation industry pro-
cesses? Which attachments and which embodied practices do different organiza-
tional structures allow for and assume?
I will begin answering these questions by returning to a study I did a while
ago together with Kristiina Abdallah (Abdallah & Koskinen 2010). Earlier, we had
looked into the issue of trust in production networks that had at the time become
a prominent new mode of organizing translation work (Abdallah & Koskinen
2007). As was already discussed in Chapters 2 and 5, trust has often been identified
as a central affective element in a translation process, and a touchstone of success-
ful translation. We argued that production networks are structurally challenging
for the creation and maintenance of trust, as they are hierarchical and scalable by
nature, that is, the network model supports the creation of a few hubs that become
obligatory points of passage and that control the flows of information between
nodes. In this power-geometry of unequal power, of asymmetric information and
of obstacles for communication between actors in node-positions, trust is struc-
turally difficult to maintain.
In a second article (Abdallah & Koskinen 2010), we then looked further into
the sense of space in the network model by analysing the spatial metaphors in use
in a single-interviewee dataset extracted from the larger pool of interview data
Abdallah had collected (for a full coverage of her project see Abdallah 2012). The
interviewee in question was a translator working as a freelancer in a production
network, and three consequent in-depth interviews had been conducted, two
made in 2006 and one in 2007. We used the method of spatial metaphor analysis,
borrowed from Susan Ainsworth, David Grant and Rick Iedema (2009) who had
applied it in their study of the identity work of middle management at a hospital.
Spatial metaphors, Ainsworth and colleagues (2009: 9) argue, can be used to anal-
yse experiences, since social relations are also spatially reproduced. Ainsworth,
Grant and Iedema (2009) maintained that middle management as an organizatory
position is in a fundamental manner spatially defined. Although not all organiza-
tional positions are explicitly labelled in such spatial terms, arguably each structure
for organizing translation work also becomes a spatial structure, and it is therefore
meaningful to analyse how this spatiality is referred to in talking about this work.
Ainsworth and colleagues observed spatial metaphors in interview talk to analyse
how the interviewees constructed the spatial relations and social processes among
 Translation and Affect

different actors, and how they built their agency and understood their positioning
in the hierarchical structure (ibid.: 12).
Kristiina Abdallah and I first got the idea of looking into spatial metaphors
through an individual comment by one the interviewees: “translators are not part
of that process” (Abdallah & Koskinen 2010: 5; direct quotations are my transla-
tions from Finnish). Since the process in question was that of translating, we were
intrigued by the lacking sense of belonging as expressed by the core professional
in charge of doing the actual translating within that process. As we maintained
in 2010, the discursive construction of space through spatial metaphors can be
understood as a resource for meaning-making in order to make sense of one’s
position and situational identity in the spaces created by social relations. Footing
and identity are closely linked to affect, as the sense of belonging or not belong-
ing, fitting or not fitting into one’s assigned place and role, are grounded in feeling,
in having a sense of one’s place. Social relations and organizational hierarchies
also bring to the fore the politics of affect, that is, “the ways in which emotions
fuel identities, worldviews, and their contestations” (Abdel-Fadil 2019: 13; see also
Massumi 2015). Observing how affect is performed and what it does in different
relational constellations as well as how these spaces can be reshaped and reor-
ganized through the management of affects and their performances (Hochschild
1979) will allow us to deepen our understanding of the spatial organization of
translation work.
The interviews from 2006 were made at a time when the interviewee was
going through a rough time in the network, and some of our findings were quite
revealing in terms of explaining why the times were felt to be rough. As a constella-
tion, a network tends to be depicted as a rhizomatic, horizontal organization. This
may be a misrepresentation; as discussed above, many networks rather exhibit a
vertical and hierarchical structure. Indeed, the interview data contained a lot of
talk that organized things into hierarchical relations of levels: “the next level,” “the
upper level,” “the middle level,” and “the level where decisions are made.” This is not
necessarily significant as such, as levels such as these are found in any workplace.
What is revealing, is that in this translation process all levels seem to be located
above the translators, who not only occupy the lowest rank but are also “not able
to make their voices heard at the decision-making level.” The translator expresses
a wish of translators “not being pushed into their corner”. The network this transla-
tor depicts is a hierarchical pyramid structure with each translator in their own
corner of the bottom floor and decision-making at the top. We first got interested
in spatial metaphors in this data through a container metaphor of (not) being part
of the process. The interviews also depict the translator as “being put in impossible
situations,” and upset about “going to a situation when one can feel one’s own pow-
erlessness”. The translator feels like a “loose part.”
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

The sense of network verticality is further reinforced in metaphors of move-

ment: things and tasks are “falling from the sky,” the prices are falling significantly,
and the situation is “going downwards” so that the translator is beginning to won-
der “how low it can go.” One movement is conspicuous in its absence: information
does not move, or it does not move towards the translator: “Why can’t the infor-
mation move?” The lack of information leaves translators in the dark, as “openness
stops like it hits a wall.” The one thing that is seen to move swiftly in the interview
talk is the copyright that moves away from the translator.
The metaphors used by the interviewee are aligned with Abdallah’s (2012)
more extensive diagnosis of the maladies of many translation production net-
works that had emerged during the first decade of the 21st century: information
was neither flowing down nor moving up; the translators interviewed by Abdallah
felt powerless in a situation where they felt their working conditions and their
fees were spiralling downwards. The translation industry seemed to have started
a race to the bottom – another spatial metaphor. Not all translators are located in
translation networks, though. Two years prior to these interviews, in 2004, I had
conducted focus group discussions with a group of in-house translators working
for the European Union. These tenured, well-paid positions are often considered
the most lucrative in the field (see Dam & Zethsen 2012). If we looked at the spa-
tial metaphors in their discourse, would we see indications of a different spatial
arrangement reflected in their talk? Could we discern a sense of another kind of
space, signalling a different grouping of interrelations?
To find out, I reanalysed the transcript of one focus group of Finnish EU
translators (held 17 June 2004) with seven participants (5 women, 2 men) with
respect to the spatial metaphors employed in the talk, paying particular atten-
tion to features we had observed in the network translator’s talk. Although spatial
metaphors had not been analysed before, also the original focus group session had
been spatially motivated both in that it aimed to uncover translators’ cultural rela-
tions and in that it was guided by a map-like visualization of discussion points (see
Koskinen 2008, Appendix 1). The new analysis only covered the segments of dis-
cussion related to work issues. The original design also contained more personal
questions such as living in Luxembourg, family issues, ties to the home country
and retirement plans; these contained a multitude of spatial metaphors, but for
simplicity of comparison they are left out here.
The spatial metaphors used by the EU translators were not at all identical to
those observed in the network case. Although there was one instance of a way of
thinking “coming from above”, and one mention of a “higher-level” decision on
terminology (reflecting the universality of up–down relations as work often tends
to be hierarchically organized), hierarchy and verticality were not dominant, and
the translators did not describe their position in terms of lowness. There was much
 Translation and Affect

more talk about vastness and complexity: the organization felt “massively huge”
and “compartmentalized,” and the translators felt isolated and “working alone”.
Translators did not see themselves in the centre of events, but they were still part
of the whole, as more than one participant emphatically pointed out: “Are we not
organically a part of the commission’s organization; so, we are a part of the com-
mission!” In the network, translators felt that information was not moving; the
commission translators did not mention this at all but emphasized the constant
movement of texts instead. In their talk texts were living and changing creatures
around which translators organized their work: texts come, they go, they visit other
places and then return in a changed format; texts come in neat piles and in piece-
meal fashion; texts are thrown away and compiled anew – and thankfully, in this
whirlwind of texts, some interim versions are stopped from coming. Translation
is text-based work. Textual relations and their material movement are therefore
central to the constellation of the space.
In their extensive project on Danish translators’ experiences of status, Helle
Dam and Karen Zethsen (2012) compared the felt status of EU translators to that
of Danish company translators. Much to their surprise, their survey results showed
very minor differences between this high-profile group and other translation pro-
fessionals, and the experienced status of EU translators was much lower than they
had expected. The spatial metaphors in use indicate that in spite of the transla-
tors’ self-perceptions, some differences may be found. Translators may be prone
to modesty, and a sense of high (sic!) status may be alien to their habitus (Simeoni
1998), but EU translators in my focus group data did not demonstrate any of the
desperation the network translators in Abdallah’s interview study showed, and their
metaphors indicate that they saw themselves as meaningful cogs in a big machin-
ery, not as loose parts. Evidence of difference in the sense of space of network trans-
lators versus EU translators also comes in an embodied form, in the affects bodily
displayed during the interview events. Laughing and crying can be seen as pro-
totypical bodily demonstrations of positive versus negative emotion. In the focus
groups of EU translators, laughter was such a predominant feature that it compelled
me to analyse it separately (Koskinen 2008: 111–117; Hokkanen & Koskinen 2016:
85–88). In Abdallah’s individual interviews with production network freelancers, in
contrast, many interviewees cried (Abdallah, personal communication).
Arguably, the focus on the discursive and the metaphorical in the analysis
above goes against Massey’s theory, which was identified as a starting point in this
chapter. Indeed, she emphatically steers away from a representational approach
that she sees as taming the spatial into the textual (2005: 20).24 But she also explains

. For an analysis of the geographical and architectural place where the EU translators were
located at the time of the field work, see Koskinen (2008, Chapter 4).
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

the multiplicity of spaces through the co-existence of multiple trajectories and the
“simultaneity of stories-so-far” (ibid.: 24). The interview data, too, can be seen as
stories told of a particular space at a particular time. What Massey argues against
is not textuality in itself but ideological closure brought through hegemonic rep-
resentation (ibid.: 25). It is therefore the task of the researcher to keep an eye on
this element in the narratives, and particularly to avoid reinforcing or producing
undue closure in the analysis. Spaces are not only talked into being, and not all rel-
evant elements are always discussed. One way of identifying what is left unsaid is
to also analyse how various non-human actors such as legal instruments or money
define the space in question. The EU translators may feel they are just like any
other translators (Koskinen 2008: 91), but we also need to remember that their
footing at work is protected by official status, permanent position, high salary and
significant social security benefits for the entire family. In contrast, the discontent
of the network translators in Abdallah’s study was aggravated by their precarious
position with little or no negotiation power, loss of copyright and poor pay (see
also Moorkens 2017).
We humans have an innate need to understand the subject position we are
working in, and we need to be able to develop an attitude towards work that allows
us to tolerate the conditions we are in, to preserve our self-respect and to see our
role as meaningful and motivating (Alasuutari 2004: 131–132). If this proves
impossible, we can use our voice to change things or exit the unbearable situa-
tion (see Hirschman 1970 for his influential notions of voice, exit and loyalty).
Being part of a process that violates your understanding of quality, being paid less
than you feel you deserve and having no voice all contribute to a “sucker effect”
(Abdallah 2010), a sense of having been played, creating a sense of resentment and
shame. A significant but somewhat unsurprising result of Abdallah’s longitudinal
interview study of eight translators in more or less precarious positions in their
various production networks was the finding that by the end of the interview cycle
five of the eight interviewees had exited the network they had been involved in
(Abdallah 2012: 50). Staff turnover and recruitment difficulties are a serious obsta-
cle for the success of production networks in a growth business such as translation
industry, and exit is therefore an issue with significant economic relevance. My EU
study did not include a longitudinal angle of repeated visits, but plans for leaving
the institution were discussed in the focus groups. These translators were not leav-
ers, except for retirement plans for those close to that phase of their career. In a
more anecdotal manner, I know that exit has been extremely rare among Finnish
EU translators, and most professional movement has taken place to a new position
within the same organization. In comparison to network translators, these transla-
tors were indeed happy campers.
A longitudinal view is a good reminder of the interrelations of space and time.
The two are “co-implicated”, as Massey (2005: 55) puts it. Space is not a t­ imeless,
 Translation and Affect

static background factor but a shifting constellation. In the three subsequent

interviews of the same interviewee analysed in Abdallah and Koskinen (2010),
we found a shift in the translator’s approach. In the two interviews in 2006, the
interviewee was emotionally consumed by her spiralling working conditions and
kept wallowing in frustration and incomprehension. In the interview of 2007, the
metaphors were different in tone. The big picture remained the same, if not worse:
“quality has collapsed,” “the movement of information is what it is,” “it is com-
pletely outside my power.” But a change was seen in the interviewee’s summary
of the situation: “One always needs to navigate ever rockier waters”. In the 2006
interviews, the translator positioned herself at the lowest level, as one with no
information and no voice; in the 2007 interview, the image was transformed into
someone actively sailing rough seas.
A longitudinal aspect offered itself to the EU project as well a few years later.
As part of the new communication strategy discussed in Chapter 3, the Com-
mission decided to place some translators in the local “antennas” in the member
states, in close contact with the communication officials working in the local office
and also closer to the local readership of translations in the home country. As the
physical location changed, the scope of the work also broadened, and in addi-
tion to continued translation activities, the “language officers” were expected to
engage in outreach activities and liaise with universities and ministries (for a fuller
account see Koskinen 2009). This move offered a natural experiment to see if and
how a change of place affects the translators’ identifications and their understand-
ing of their task, that is, their sense of space. The findings from an in-house trans-
lation unit in Luxembourg were now complemented with and contrasted to new
group-interview data from the three translators selected to be the first ones placed
in the Helsinki office. The interview was held in March 2008, approximately half-
way through their three-year secondment from 1 January 2007 onwards, and the
results were reported in Koskinen (2009).
The results indicate that the institutional space and material place occupied by
the translators can indeed drastically affect their experienced status, commitment
and job satisfaction even while staying within the same organizational setting. In
the translation unit, feedback had been felt to be non-existent; the antenna transla-
tors, in contrast, had an abundance of feedback. Motivation had been an issue; the
antenna translators loved their work: “The tasks are simply so much fun. I am hav-
ing a great time here.” The core explanatory concept identified in the article was
recognition. The translators seconded to the Helsinki antenna were moved from a
separate and isolated unit (Koskinen 2008, Chapter 4) to a shared office space with
the local communication team, they were given extensive institutional attention
and feedback, their tasks put them in regular interpersonal contact with various
stakeholders, and their translation assignments were targeted at j­ournalists and
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

put to immediate use in the local news. All this a made them feel like “full part-
ners”, in contrast to their colleagues in the translation unit who were subject to
other kinds of institutionalized patterns of cultural value:

When, … [institutionalised patterns of cultural value] constitute some actors as

inferior, excluded, wholly other, or simply invisible – in other words, as less than
full partners in social interaction – then we can speak of misrecognition and sta-
tus subordination. (Fraser 2000: 113)

The interviews and focus group discussions that form the basis of this section were
conducted between 2004 and 2008, that is, a decade or more ago. Change was one
of the findings in both the network models and the EU context. The spaces of
translation were not static, and neither were the spatializations and self-concepts
of the actors. What is, then, the point of returning to such old data and rehears-
ing old arguments? I do think there is some permanence in the vertical versus
horizontal understanding of translation space in networks versus in-house situa-
tions, and the positions available to translators in these two configurations. Hav-
ing said that, it seems evident that the network model, which was more recent in
the mid-2000s than towards the 2020s, has evolved significantly. I do not have
similar interview data from current networks, but my more casual observations
suggest that while the problems discussed by the interviewed translator in 2006
and 2007 have not disappeared, many of the translators working in these produc-
tion networks have learned to navigate. Navigating is an agentic activity where the
agent scans the surroundings to define their location and then moves accordingly,
actively changing their position, affecting a change in the network as well. Massey
(2005: 55) argues that space is an “open, on-going production” and she cites (ibid.:
51) Derrida’s views of spacing as a productive, positive, generative force. When
translators navigate, they are opening up and re-spacing the networks they work
in. The change of affective stance and sense of empowerment on the one hand and
the material and organizational changes on the other hand interrelate in multifari-
ous ways, and instigating a change in one can and will also change the other.
Having the power to affect changes requires empowerment, which in turn
requires reflexivity both about the surrounding space and about one’s affective
relations to it (see Chapter 8). It may well be that the repeated interviews with
the researcher served as a medium for reflexion or a sort of trauma counselling
for the interviewee discussed above, allowing her to reassess the situation and her
possibilities for action and to therefore produce a change in the affective climate.
Sometimes it may help if one turns the tables. For example, microentrepreneur
translators can perceive themselves as abandoned nods at the outskirts of a mas-
sive translation network, or they can place their one-person company as the cen-
tral hub of their personal network that consists of many agencies and clients as
 Translation and Affect

well as fellow translators. The landscape shifts dramatically, both spatially and
affectively. It seems to me that many translators working in production networks
may have done just that. Concerted action of individual nodes can also radically
alter the space as the interrelations change. For example, the network discussed by
the translator in 2006–2007 has since that time been pushed to rethink its opera-
tional practices by the combined force of united translators.
Massey (2005: 13) emphasizes the inherent liveliness and anti-essentiality of
spatiality. No spatial organization of translation work can claim permanence. In an
unjust situation, it is only normal to be drawn into feelings such as anger, anxiety
or shame. Healing and empowerment, and change, can begin when we are not
paralyzed by these feelings but learn to live with them, allowing negative affects to
indicate where things need to be changed and which personal or collective shad-
ows need to be brought to light (on shadows, see also Section 8.3). Affects – even,
or perhaps particularly, negative ones – can be turned into a source of energy that
allows us to not only be affected by the spatial arrangements and exercise our right
to exit, but also to affect these arrangements in ways that allow for a flow of more
positive affects.

6.2.2 The spaces of translation in poetry performances

The previous section looked at the senses of space of professional translators
located in different organizational structures. In this section we turn to another
spatial question, that of the spaces and places of translation, and the affectivities
involved. In a way, this is a move to an entirely new topic; on a more general level,
I continue to explore the contact points of space and affect in translation. The
case I have selected for analysis here is that of multilingually performed poetry.
Performative arts, and the contemporary arts scene in general, are becoming more
and more overtly multilingual. More often than not, these multilingual practices
contain translational elements: two or more languages coexist in ways that reflect
and repeat content, and this coexistence allows translationality to have more or
less independent artistic value. In other words, translation occupies its own space
in the performance. What this space can be, and what kind of artistic value it may
accumulate, is the question I explore in this section. This discussion will also allow
us to begin to explore the contact points of the aesthetic and the affective: the artis-
tic value of translation is closely connected to aesthetic appraisal.
To begin to unravel the spatial positions available for translating in the context
of an artistic performance, I present the results of a small-scale fieldwork project.
I visited a literature event, the Poetry Marathon in Lahti, Finland, and observed
the various translational practices involved in its programme for one day (18 June
2016). Poetry serves my current purposes well, because it is a short literary form.
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

Within a one-day visit one can observe a set of different practices and solutions.
In the entire programme for that particular day, for example, there was only one
act where translation played no role (i.e., a Finnish poet recited her poems writ-
ten in Finnish and performed in Finnish); all other performances had an explicit
translatorial connection, and they all had different approaches to tackling with the
necessity of translating. Three performances, each containing a distinct approach
to translation, were selected for analysis. These are analysed here from the per-
spective of spaces and places accorded to translation and translators, and the kinds
of affective landscapes of translation that were produced. In short, I am analysing
the translation spaces created for and during the event.
Among literary genres, poetry has often been seen as the touchstone of trans-
lation, as the form and content are so tightly knit together. In the contemporary
literary scene, it is also prototypically a written art form, and research into trans-
lating poetry has focused more on textual analysis than the various ways of staging
poetry translation. The performativity of poetry itself has recently become more to
the forefront as poetry slams and other modes of staging poetry have gained popu-
larity. Of course, the close ties between poetry and singing, and its long history
of recitals, also link poetry to performing in more permanent ways. The Poetry
Marathon Festival, too, is not a recent invention; it has been organized biannu-
ally since 1982, before the current fashions. This fairly long history may partially
explain the many faces of translation in the event of 2016. What first aroused my
research interest was the mixture of different microclimates of translation in the
event and the changing affective spaces assigned to translatoriality in each piece.
In the following, I will walk you through three of the performances staged in Lahti,
describing the spaces as they unfolded and evolved during the event and looking
into the affects at play.
The first translatorial act was a bow to the tradition of the Poetry Marathon,
as a group of performers from the organizing community Päijät-Hämeen lausu-
jat performed “Finno-Ugric poetry”.25 The introductory speech explained that the
poems to be recited were originally written in Finno-Ugric minority languages
(Udmurt, Hill Mari and Meadow Mari, and Sami), but they would all be per-
formed in a Finnish translation, and also some Finnish poems would be included.
The poems were then performed by several presenters, all of them recited mono-
lingually in Finnish, with no identification of their source language, source culture
or translator. Most of the space available was, in other words, given to translation,

. The event in 2016 was organized concurrently with the World Congress of Finno-Ugric
peoples, and it therefore contained a number of acts that referred to language minorities and
Finno-Ugric languages.
 Translation and Affect

but in a less than entirely overt form. The performance was reliant on but indif-
ferent to translation, in what could perhaps be called the traditional way. The pro-
cess of translation was not flagged, and its consequences to what was on display
was not signalled as problematic, interesting or artistically relevant. This approach
foregrounded the universality of poetry and the idea of poetry moving fluently
across linguistic borders. Poetry was also portrayed as an agentless art form, and
the performers remained as nameless as the poets and translators. Affectively, the
act downplayed translation and made it insignificant, but it also trusted transla-
tion. Moving the poems into a new lingua-cultural space was not seen as a risk that
might produce shifts in meaning, style or form that would render the process of
translating worth illuminating. Aesthetically, the translations were accepted as the
poem, not as a second-rate reflection or replica.
The next act was the complete opposite of the first recital. The two poets from
the multicultural project Sivuvalo (‘Sidelight’) had translation fully integrated into
their performances. The act consisted of several independent parts, with different
translatorial practices. The poet Zoila Forss “from Kerava [a town in Finland],
Peru”, read her poems first in Spanish and then in Finnish; Polina Kopylova who
is originally from St. Petersburg in Russia read her poems in the original language
(mainly in Russian, some in Finnish) while the text was projected on a screen in
the other language. The texts on-screen appeared to be quite literal translations,
but Kopylova emphasized that they were actually not translations at all but simply
“reflections in another language.” The final piece was Forss’ video poem Maquina,
in Spanish and with Finnish subtitles, that is, with translation in its traditional
supportive role.26
In this performance, a sidelight was constantly shed on translation, as the
coexistence of two languages was its essential element, and the necessity of trans-
lation was highlighted by the two performers with an immigrant background. At
the same time, the spaces and places of translation were shifting in the different
parts of the performance. The forceful and slightly off translations by Zoila Forss
flexed the expressive repertoires of the Finnish language, and the Spanish and
Finnish versions shed light on one another and were given the floor one after the
other, recited as two independent poems. The translation was given a prominent
position, but it was always given a secondary place after the original. In contrast,
Kopylova’s modest and unvoiced “reflections” were not portrayed as independent
artistic achievements. Their unadorned style, and the near-obsolete overhead-
projector technology employed, was rather a signal of the limits of translation and
its role as a mere crutch for grasping the basic contents of the poem, intended

. Available at http://zolmarpe.wix.com/zoila-forss#!forss-videopoetry/t26xa (viewed

15.10.2019).
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

for those in the audience who did not know the original language. On the other
hand, while the hierarchy of the two languages for Forss was static, in Kopylova’s
performance they alternated in the roles of source and target language, signalling
the temporariness of their status.
The outcome of the multiple ways of engaging with translation was the cre-
ation of a space of foregrounded translation during the two Sivuvalo poets’ suc-
cessive performances. The different parts of the performance shed light on one
another’s concepts of translation, creating a discussion on the possibility and the
limits of artistic translation. The audience was constantly reminded of the move-
ment between languages and invited to contemplate the artistic status of the
translations on display. Affectively, translation was portrayed as a necessity and
a channel for communication for poets using a language that was not originally
theirs. At the same time, their fluent ability to also use the adopted language as an
element of artistic expression made the act a powerful performance of personal
translatedness. From the perspective of communication, the translation was pro-
vided for the audience. For the poets themselves, self-translation and the use of
more than one language was part of their artistic repertoire, not a crutch. How
they decided to work with the material of translationality differed: with one, we
experienced each poem in two languages, with the other, the audience saw a poet
with two alternating languages.
The landscape of translatoriality was again very different in the final act of
the day, a duet by a Japanese poet Yumi Fuzuki and her Finnish translator Mayu
Saaritsa.27 The translator was both named and visible, and had a central role. In
fact, she had two roles: a performing translator reading out her own translations
from a published book and the consecutive interpreter to Yumi Fuzuki’s talk. On
the stage, the two young women stood side by side, and the Japanese and the Finn-
ish versions of the poems proceeded stanza by stanza. For someone like me, with
no Japanese, the performance was captivating. The only accessible element of the
source text was its foreign, rhythmic tongue, as it was recited to the audience in
a lively and varied manner by a young-looking poet in a girly dress and stock-
ings embroidered with poetry. The poems were set in the school environment,
and the recitation was full of teenage emotion, the voice conveying haste, pas-
sion and terror, and the poet’s body resonating with the text. In comparison, the
translator looked like her big sister: the gestures were gentler, the voice less agi-
tated, the language more solemn. Her recital was a bit more distanced, like she was

. This performance also included a third partner, the Japanese body artist Hikaru Cho, who
completed a body paining on the back of a model on stage during the recital. This embodied
performance was, in my interpretation, separate from the two performers disussed here, rather
than an intersemiotic translation of the poems. Hence, I leave it outside my analysis.
 Translation and Affect

r­emembering more distant past events. My field notes sound like wine-tasting:
gentle and harmonious, spacious (“lempeän seesteinen, laakea”). Together, the
two performed a fascinating and emotionally laden dialogue. On the surface level,
the translation was a communicative tool that connected the poet and the audi-
ence, but it was not a lifeless “reflection” of the original poem. The translation took
its visible and audible space as a full partner in creating the aesthetic performance
of two artists of equal expressive force. The ensuing dialogue of two personalities
allowed the audience to experience two interpretations of the poems, swaying in
two directions.
The three consecutive acts capture a continuum of translation spaces, and
the role accorded to or taken by translation in the production of the aesthetic
experience varied from taken-for-grantedness to centrality, from a communica-
tive support function to independent artistic value. I originally visited the event
as a regular member of audience, turning on my observer role as I got interested
in the multitude of translatoriality, and became fascinated by how the various
translation spaces created in these performances affected reception. The answer
to my research question “How were the performance and the audience affected
by translatoriality?” seems quite obvious: the more translation was perceived as
another artistic medium (as opposed to a merely communicative function and
a supportive role) and the more it was put in dialogue with the source material
on an equal footing (as opposed to either replacing the original entirely or being
left in a shadowy position), the more complexity and interpretive depth it added
to the performance. The more the translationality of translation was allowed to
impregnate the performance, the more complex and therefore more rewarding
the affective experience of translatoriality was. The richness of translation as an
aesthetic and affective resource is seldom fully embraced in performative produc-
tions, and also in the Poetry Marathon not all translatorial spaces appeared to be
a result of careful artistic consideration. But one also needs to acknowledge that
the influence of the translation on the performance, that is, its performative value
(Apter 2005: xx), was in fact greatest in the first act that seemed to pay no atten-
tion to translation. The recital was built on the truism of translation being “the
same” as the original but in another language, and the complete non-transparency
allowed translation to usurp all performative power. This coexistence of multiple
trajectories within the space of poetry translation and its performance, both in
general and in the microcosm of one particular event, testifies to space as a sphere
of coexisting heterogeneity (Massey 2005: 9).

6.2.3 The space of translation as a playground

The first case above focused on an analysis of the types of spaces that are regu-
larly available to professional translators. The second case investigated the space
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

afforded or actively taken by translation in the context of a literary event. In this

third case we look at how a designated place reserved for translation can be repur-
posed, or hijacked, for particular affectively laden aims. The place in question is
the space reserved for subtitles in audio-visual material, and the affectively laden
repurposing that of a memetic recycling of video clips with new captions.
Performative translation as in the poetry event discussed above has a lot of
potential for carving out new spaces for translation, but it is not too likely to dra-
matically unsettle the basic cultural values associated with translation. At least
in the Poetry Marathon of 2016 in Lahti, translation was still very much based
on assumptions of equivalence of one kind or another (of universality, of seman-
tic content, or of artistic value). Some sub-areas of amateur translation are more
radical. Various amateur translation activities such as fansubbing, scanlation and
fan translation of song lyrics have become more visible, and most probably also
more common, as digitalization has supported both translation practices and the
distribution of translations in communities of like-minded aficionados. In these
fandom-based communities, affectivity is the bedrock of translation activity
(Pérez-González 2016), and translating what you love, discussed in Chapter 2, the
rationale for translation work.
While strict expectations of equivalence or accuracy often also prevail in love-
based fan-translation communities where the idolization of the source text is often
a fundamental motivating factor for the translation activity, in some other trans-
latorial landscapes the entire idea of equivalence is carnevalistically eschewed in
favour of exhibiting affective qualities such as fun, wittiness, creativity or activism.
I am referring to the practice of introducing new subtitles to certain iconic video
clips. These deliberately fake subtitles belong to an emerging genre of “prosumer-
istic cybersubtitling” (Díaz Cintas 2018). Most internet users have probably come
across a version of the most popular memes, but if you are not yet familiar with the
genre, you can begin by searching for, for example, “Hitler finds out” or “Shocking
interview”, and you can find countless specimens of the two examples discussed
below. It is accidental but not too unexpected that these two famous cases are also
mentioned by Díaz Cintas (ibid.) to illustrate fake subtitling.
Searching for “Hitler finds out” or “Hitler reacts,” one will find a number of
online caption editors for the “Downfall parody”, and numerous results of their
use. The editor applications have been designed to help anyone create their own
subtitles to a video clip of a scene of the 2004 film Downfall depicting Hitler
(played by Bruno Ganz) in the last days of the war in the bunker with his staff,
becoming increasingly furious as he learns of the failure of General Steiner to ward
off the Soviet advance on Berlin. The scene, the climax of the film, is emotionally
laden, and the characters’ affects are vividly displayed in their tone of voice, facial
expressions and body language. The second example discussed in this section,
the laughing Spanish man of “the shocking interview,” is much more benign and
 Translation and Affect

c­ ulturally non-iconic in terms of representation and referencing. The protagonist

of this meme is Juan Joya Borja, a Spanish actor and comedian with a very catchy
laugh, hence the nickname El Risitas (‘The Giggles’). The viral video clip “Pelleras”
is originally from a TV interview shot in 2007, and in it El Risitas tells an inconse-
quential anecdote of working in a seaside paella place. The fascination of the clip is
based on the hilarious and contagious giggle first by the interviewee and then also
by the interviewer – and the viewer.
The popularity of the Hitler meme builds on the immediate recognizability
of the protagonist, and on the idea of the fall of the empire that has become to
epitomize evil in generations of Westerners. The humour and the effectiveness of
the remixed videos is a result of using the subtitles to mix this original set-up with
some more mundane issues, out of proportion with the extreme reaction depicted.
The shocking interview meme functions the other way around. The personality of
the laughing man and the content of the original interview are inconsequential
and not known to many non-Spanish-speaking viewers. The remixability origi-
nates from the contagious laughter that can be mixed with all kinds of new content
in the subtitles, ranging from the economic crisis in Greece to Apple computers
and beyond.
Some might argue that with these parody subtitles we are no longer dealing
with translation, particularly because of the required lack of equivalence with the
original verbalized meaning on which the humour of the meme stands on. The
point is not to reproduce but to creatively replace the original content in favour of
playful new material. Admittedly, we are not dealing with prototypical translation.
Still, the practice retains elements that place it within the area of translational-
ity. First, it utilizes a translation genre of subtitling, and the place designated to
inter- or intralinguistic subtitles, as well as the technology designed for translation
purposes. Second, as far as I can see, the genre seems to respect the idea of inter-
linguality: I have not been able to find parody subtitles in German for the Hitler
meme or in Spanish for El Risitas. Third, and importantly, while the content is to
be changed, the form is expected to follow patterns of speaking in ways that agree
with the norms of prototypical subtitling, and one element of success is also how
convincingly the subtitles manage to appear as if they might be representations of
what was actually said. In this they differ from some other cases of “fake” subtitles
where subtitling is not tied to any visual or audio text but seems to live a life of
its own (for an example of this kind of subtitling, see, the beginning of the film
Monty Python and the Holy Grail from 1976, and the story of the Swedish møøse
[sic] that is run in the subtitles during the credits). Many caption editors support
this synchronized form with the help of ready-made timing, saving subtitlers a lot
of effort.
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

This kind of loss of content in favour of other qualities is not entirely unheard
of in translation history. In homonymic poetry translation it is the phonetic form
that overrides the content; witty funniness is the crucial quality that determines
the acceptability of the outcome. Accuracy is nothing; acceptability, and with it,
virality, is everything. This genre, extreme as it is, allows us to appreciate the fun-
damental affective and interpersonal nature of acceptability: if the viewer fails to
appreciate both the social commentary underlying the effort and the execution
that allows the viewer to be entertained, the clip fails as a translation.
One way of understanding the nature of these subtitles is to think of them as a
subcategory of pseudotranslations (also called fictional translations). Toury (2012:
47–59) discusses this phenomenon in literature, identifying a number of typical
features such as introducing novelties and literary innovations and avoiding sanc-
tions for norm-breaking publications. The core idea of a pseudotranslation is that
it purports being a translation when factually it is not. Toury (ibid.: 47) focuses
on how pseudotranslation activates what is called the Source-Text Postulate, that
is, the tacit assumption that for a text to be assumed to be translation, it is to be
genetically linked to a prior corresponding text in another language. Parody sub-
titles are different from Touryan pseudotranslation in that they are not defined by
a lacking source text. On the contrary, they are presented together with the source
text, in the physical place reserved for translation. Instead, their success is predi-
cated on the tension they create with another postulate on Toury’s list of features of
assumed translation (ibid.: 28): the Relationship Postulate. This postulate is tricky
to define, as the exact nature of the relationship is open to many interpretations,
and the actual translation products may not necessarily comply with prevailing
expectations (ibid.: 30). Toury’s definition of the Relationship Postulate is vague,
and other scholars trying to tackle this same fundamental of translation have also
struggled. While the requirement of a relationship between source and target texts
has been widely accepted as a necessary condition for translationality, translation
studies does not have a disciplinary consensus on what forms the relationship can
take. Attempts have ranged from Koller’s (1979) early classification of five differ-
ent equivalence relations to Chesterman’s notion of relevant similarity (2016: 15).
To bluntly sum up the theoretical common ground, some sort of a relationship is
assumed between the source and the target text, but its exact nature depends.
The concept of equivalence allows us to begin to untangle the various options
for a relationship. Chesterman (2016: 4) identifies equivalence among the super-
memes of translation, that is, among powerful and persistent ways of thinking
around translation. This makes sense. It is well-known that lay understandings
of translation build on a simplified assumption of sameness, and they often
imply denotational or semantic sameness. This lay view is not highly valued in
 Translation and Affect

the professional and academic circles. In contrast, the fake subtitles might allow
us researchers to probe how far we are willing to depart from the expectation of
semantic correspondence. Toury does not explicitly mention semantic equiva-
lence as one dominant contemporary realization of the Relationship Postulate, but
for many this may be the defining feature in categorizing these subtitles as non-
translational: the foundational prohibition on reproducing semantic content to be
accepted in this genre violates a norm of assumed translation for many. The meme
makers do not work without a source text; they simply do not aim to reproduce its
semantic content.
Another theoretical framework that seems particularly apt is that of carnival-
ism (see also Díaz Cintas 2018). The anonymous meme creators carnivalistically
appropriate the original and make it their own. Carnivalism is brought to play in
translation theory to signal creative and empowered translation practices, cham-
pioning creative appropriations. To my knowledge, the most extended exposition
of carnivalistic translation is the book Kääntäjän karnevaali [Translator’s carni-
val] by Riitta Oittinen (1995). This programmatic manifesto, written for transla-
tion students, builds on Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogism and evokes his
notion of carnivalistic laughter with an explicit aim of empowering the students to
steer away from slavish rerenderings. It promotes a fearless and playful approach
to translation:

The carnival of translation, to me, means that the translator laughs benevolently
at the original, comes close to it and owns it through profanation.… The carnival
means joyful, fearless translating. (1995: 149; my translation)

The word carnival also alludes to the carnal, bodily side of the carnivalesque. It
is not insignificant that the quotation, too, depicts a laughing translator, fearlessly
moving to the close proximity of the original. The embodied terminology underlines
the personal, affective stance Oittinen promotes. But let us pause to think through
the adverb “benevolently”. Oittinen’s dialogic carnival depicts a happy and playful
encounter with the original. But the emphasis on the goodwill of the carnivalistic
translator seems to indicate a difficulty of letting go of the image of the translator
as someone who does good things – a feature often seen in metaphors of transla-
tion as bridge-building in translation theories. Profanation, a word left – perhaps
strategically – unexplained in the above quotation, however, reveals the darker
side of carnivalism (and of translation in general). The Merriam-Webster online
dictionary gives the following definitions to the word “profane”: (1) to treat (some-
thing sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt, to desecrate, and (2) to debase
by a wrong, unworthy, or vulgar use. If one further follows the link to “desecrate”,
one finds another similar duo: (1) to violate sanctity of something, or (2) to treat
disrespectfully, irreverently, or outrageously. Oittinen’s image of a carnivalesque
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

translator is intended as a model of all (literary) translation. In reality the most

carnivalesque translation practices, however, are not necessarily found in serious-
minded literary translation but in the cyberspace. The second definitions, such as
debasing by vulgar use or treating disrespectfully and irreverently are ill-fitting to
the benevolent, loving image of the carnivalistic translator Oittinen depicts, but
they seem very apt in the context of the parody subtitles discussed here.
The fake subtitles contain an element of wilful suspension of disbelief familiar
from literary theory (Díaz Cintas 2018): the subtitler knows that most viewers
know that the subtitles are not a representation of what was actually said, but the
whole point is to play along as if they were, and to allow the affects displayed in
the original footage (the uncontrollable laughter in the case of the Spanish man;
the fury of the Führer in the Hitler clip) to blend in with the new meaning intro-
duced in the subtitles. The exuberant display of affect in the clips is the source of
their remixability, and the success of the resulting mix rests on the excess of affect
that allows for the new meaning to gain force. The idea is to turn things on their
head: the funniness of the Hitler memes rests on combining a banal issue with the
fury of the Führer; the mindless giggle can be used to bring home political com-
mentary or to promote a particular social view. For example, the “shocking inter-
view”, which gained global fame and millions of views in 2015 when it was used
to criticize Apple, had earlier been memetized for political aims by the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt where the new subtitles were designed to mock president
El-Sisi in 2014.
There are numerous examples of pseudotranslations in literary history, but
as Toury (2012: 48) points out, for reasons such as tightened copyright legislation
and better flows of information, contemporary pseudotranslations are more likely
to be found outside the most canonized sectors of culture. He also underlines the
relevance of researching them, as they can prove very revealing for understanding
the culture in question, and emphasizes that this strategy should not be viewed as
a mere curiosity or cheating (ibid.). In the same spirit, I argue that parody subtitles
are an important object of study as they highlight “the position and role of transla-
tions, or possibly of a particular sub-system thereof, within the culture, which the
pseudotranslations are aware of and put to use” (ibid.: 50–51).
The metaphors of cannibalistic and carnivalistic translation question any sim-
ple assumptions of a tidy hierarchical duality between “original” and “translation”.
Commentators have emphasized the ultimate fidelity of the cannibal, in a very
radical form, and the idea of devouring as a form of reverence and appreciation
(Vieira 1994; Oittinen 1995: 149). This interpretation may be too tame: maybe
we should accept and celebrate cannibalism and carnivalism specifically for their
radical departure from any notion of fidelity and value them as an ultimate test
for arguments of translation being more than a mimetic reproduction of semantic
 Translation and Affect

meaning, and of seeing it as “a technology of literary replication that engineers

textual afterlife without recourse to a genetic origin” (Apter 2005: 171).
In their extremeness, parody subtitles allow us to reflect on our own culturally
programmed affects towards translation, as readers, translators, translator trainers
and researchers. It is a standard view in contemporary translation theories that
translation cannot be conceived of from a perspective of producing denotative
equivalence only. But how far are we willing to go? Are we able to appreciate and
give space to translation that entirely ignores the content? And whether or not
we are, what kinds of affective responses does this kind of subversiveness evoke
in us? At the most fundamental level, this memetic subtitling activity desacral-
izes and profanes translation itself. The carnivalism of parody translations such as
these memetic subtitles not only lies in their disrespectful and wilful mistreatment
of the original content of the video clips but also in the carnivalistic overturn-
ing of the most sacred premise of translation as sameness. They also turn on its
head another “primal truism of translation” (Apter 2005: 159): translation always
entails a loss. In these parody subtitles the loss is carnivalistically maximized, and
the original intent is cannibalistically devoured and reproduced in a new, twisted
form. For some, calling this practice “translation” is indeed outrageous. For oth-
ers, it is a translatorial playground where the rules of prototypical and professional
translation are profanely overturned.

***

This chapter has covered lot of space [sic!] and a range of different studies. Here,
I try to summarize the main take-aways. First, translation and interpreting are
always organized spatially, in the sense of interrelations and positions, and the
embodied translators and interpreters are always located in a place, and so are
translations in a material sense. Second, translation occupies a socio-cultural,
organizational or institutional space. Third, translation also provides a cultural
space that can be made meaningful in many different ways and that can be used
for different purposes.
The definitions of space and place are not very strict in previous theoretical
literature, and my usage is probably also somewhat shaky. To an extent it is neces-
sarily so, because places and spaces are both mental constructions and interpreta-
tions. We produce them through meaning-making based on their qualities, factual
and otherwise. And we no doubt sway in producing these constructions. Although
the definitions are not watertight, it still seems analytically useful to differenti-
ate between physical/material/geographical places, and the virtual and relational
spaces that have been the main focus of this chapter. Both enable and constrain
translation work, and both are a source of affective involvement. Belonging, rec-
ognition, motivation and job satisfaction were among the affects that came up,
 Chapter 6. Translation and the sense of space 

as were laughter, playfulness, creativity and carnivalistic fearlessness. The most

prevalent social emotion in connection to translation, however, seems to be trust,
as also these cases demonstrate. Trust is a relational affect, dialogically connecting
the one doing the trusting and the other being trusted. Massey’s understanding of
both space and place focuses on interrelations, and it is therefore not too unex-
pected that her thinking gains prominence in analysing translation. But there is
more to it. Regardless of the spatial organization of translationality, and regardless
of genre or mode, trust seems to push itself to the foreground. Similar to memes
of translation (Chesterman 2016) where some memes are so dominant that they
can be called supermemes, trust seems to warrant the role of a super-affect in
the context of translatoriality. Some spaces and some places support trusting rela-
tions; others make them harder to maintain. But few operate in the manner of fake
subtitles that radically eschew the expectation of trustworthiness. Indeed, this is
precisely the source of their radicalness.
 chapter 7

Translation technology and affect

All previous chapters have focused on affect as a human capacity, either as an

individual bodily experience or an interpersonal flow of energy. In this chapter
this perspective is expanded by also considering the ability of inhuman objects
to affect. More specifically, this chapter builds on acknowledging the deeply tech-
nologized nature of contemporary translation work and the increasingly non-
human outlook of translation in the future. Translation has always developed in
pace with technological advances, from papyrus rolls to the printing press and
word processors, but the speed of development has never been greater than in the
past two decades, and we have witnessed the birth of designated translation tech-
nologies and an increasingly automated and globalized translation industry. It is
only logical, then, that in 21st-century translation studies topics related to transla-
tion technology have pushed themselves to the forefront of research. A number of
scholars have also looked into attitudinal factors, opening up areas of shared inter-
est with affect-based approaches (e.g., Lagoudaki 2008; Olohan 2011; Marshman
& Bowker 2012; LeBlanc 2013; Moorkens & O’Brien 2017; O’Brien et al. 2017).
Another emerging approach focuses on usability issues and ergonomics, bringing
the physical bodies of translators into sharp focus, but also looking into cognitive
ergonomics and the mental load caused by technology (see e.g., Ehrensberger-
Dow & O’Brien 2015).
This chapter is divided into two sections, based on two currently dominant
technological approaches: the first one discusses computer-assisted translation
and the second one machine translation. They are organized slightly differently,
but each follows a case study approach in focussing on one study from the per-
spective of affect. Section 7.1 reports on my earlier work on translators’ affective
narratives concerning translation technology. Drawing on science and technol-
ogy studies it looks at the dance of agency (Olohan 2011; Ruokonen & Koskinen
2017) between the human translators and their tools, focusing on affect as a flow
between man and machine in an increasingly posthumanist, post-anthropocentric
world (Braidotti 2013). I have not done empirical research specifically on machine
translation, but the topic is so central to today’s translatorial landscape that it could
not be left out. In Section 7.2, I therefore rely quite heavily on the work of Läubli
 Translation and Affect

and Orrego-Carmona (2017), reporting on their qualitative analysis of translators’

discourse on machine translation in social media. This study begins to chart the
many roles of affect in machine translation contexts and utilizes an automated sen-
timent analysis tool and thus also showcases new methodological opportunities
for studying translation and affect. The chapter ends with an attempt to identify
and predict some future trends in this rapidly evolving area (Section 7.3).

7.1 Translators’ technology-related affects

When new technologies are introduced in a workplace, understanding and man-

aging the emotions of different professional groups is a key to success in their
acceptance and adoption of the technology (see e.g., Venkatesh & Bala 2008). For
the past two decades, translation workplaces across the globe have been a veri-
table laboratory for managing technological change, as the translation industry
has become an early adopter of large-scale automatization and digitalization,
the effects of which are only beginning to be felt in many other fields. As far as I
know, there are no large-scale and long-term studies on technology adoption in
the translation industry, let alone on the affective elements thereof, so we need
to rely on more fragmented pieces of information. The insights discussed in this
section have mainly been obtained during an exploratory research project where I
asked translators to write love letters or break-up letters to the various elements of
their work. In a slightly ironic and decisively playful manner, this method invites
the respondents to play along with the idea of the centrality of love as an affect
that qualifies translation (see Chapter 2), and to touch base with their inner moti-
vation as well as factors eating away that motivation. The method has originally
been designed in usability research to elicit information on the affects users attach
to devices and objects (Hanington & Martin 2012: 114; see also Gerber 2012).
It proved unexpectedly fruitful also for the purposes of uncovering some traits
and trends in translators’ attachments, providing a rich and nuanced dataset that
has elicited a number of different studies. In addition to the technology-related
aspects discussed in more detail below (Koskinen & Ruokonen 2017; Ruokonen
& Koskinen 2017), it has given insights for reassessing (and, somewhat counter-
intuitively) providing support to Simeoni’s classic argument of translators’ servile
habitus (Simeoni 1998; Koskinen 2014b) and prompted an exploration of the role
of serendipity in information seeking (Salmi & Koskinen 2018).
The letters were originally solicited in order to find out the relative status and
role of technology in translators’ mappings of positive and negative emotions. To
allow for a variety of responses and to avoid guiding the selection process of the
addressees to these letters in one way or another, the guidelines for the task were
 Chapter 7. Translation technology and affect 

very broad, and the respondents were also instructed to trust their first instincts
and not to think too analytically before responding. The instructions also focused
explicitly on experience and emotions:

Picture yourself in the space where you normally work with your translation as-
signments. Try to capture your first, intuitive reaction to the following question:
What is the greatest tool or support for you when you are translating? What gives
you the most pleasure? What would you be most reluctant to lose?
Or do some reverse thinking: What is the most annoying hindrance you need to
deal with? Which tool, artefact or element is emotionally the most unpleasant?
What would you be happy to get rid of?

During Spring 2014, a total of 148 letters were collected from 102 respondents,
representing professional translators in Finland and in the European Union insti-
tutions as well as translation students in two universities located in Finland and
another European country. The instructions were given in Finnish or in English,
and the letters were also written in these two languages.
Translators are by definition experienced writers, and the invitation to engage
in this playful task of fictional letter-writing was met with enthusiasm. The task was
presented as an either/or choice, but as the numbers also indicate, many respon-
dents opted to write two letters (or one letter with both love letter and break-up
letter elements in them, and these we split into two for the analysis). This fur-
ther attests to the ease with which participants were able to approach this slightly
unconventional task. To give you a taste of the data, I quote one response in full:
Dear Internet,
This is the first time I’m writing to you although my feelings for you have been
strong and warm for a long time. I remember when we were both still young and
foolish, but since the bubbly infatuation of our first encounters my feelings have
gradually deepened as we have both matured and grown to know each other bet-
ter, and I could no longer imagine a single working day without you.
I know, my dearest Internet, that some people find you unreliable, but I have
learned to take you as you are and act accordingly – after all, there are always
two parties to a relationship, and I couldn’t require you to be absolutely reliable
but must be aware of my responsibility and duty to make an effort and be critical
of the sources you offer. It is in this way that we can both keep our relationship
rewarding.
Love,
(FI-48, translation MR and KK)

The wording allowed respondents to choose any element of their practice as the
recipient of their letters. A wide array of objects of love and hate were i­ dentified,
 Translation and Affect

and many letters included more than one object (a full picture is given in Koski-
nen 2014b). Technology was by far the most discussed theme in all letters: of the
148 letters, 106 engaged directly with some aspect of technology, ranging from
prototypical translation technologies such as translation memory software and
machine translation systems to other software (such as word processors, time
management systems and operating systems), search tools and databases, hard-
ware (laptop, mouse, keyboard) and references to computers or IT in general.
In discussions about translators and technology, translators are often seen
to have a negative mind-set or resistance towards technological change (e.g.,
Läubli and Orrego-Carmona 2017: 67; Cadwell et al. 2018; see also Drugan 2013:
24; O’Brien et al. 2017). This view may be a bit unfair towards a group using
sophisticated technical tools. Translators may be showing signs of technostress,
which is known to be a persistent problem in IT use across fields, observed and
verified in multiple studies on information systems (Pirkkalainen et al. 2017).
Technostress reduces performance and harms individual wellbeing. To manage
their stress levels, IT users may resort to emotional coping strategies such as
distress venting and distancing (ibid.). Looking through the (still rather meagre)
body of research in translation contexts, and considering the pace and extent of
technological change in the translation industry, one can hypothesize that all
things considered translators exhibit rather moderate levels of technostress and
that they may have been able to also create more proactive coping strategies than
venting and distancing.
When collecting the letters, I intentionally promoted venting. The task
description quoted above specifically mentions tools, and its tone can easily be
seen as an open invitation to rant, and one might therefore expect to see a flood
of break-up letters, but in fact, love letters were more dominant both in general
and among letters that discussed technology. In 57 letters, technology was seen
in a positive light, while 40 manifested a negative attitude towards it. This in itself
indicates that translators are perhaps less averse to technology than has sometimes
been suggested. On the other hand, the total amount of break-up letters was 56,
so that the 40 letters including technology made up more than 70 per cent of all
break-up letters. Technological tools were criticized for being slow, unreliable or
difficult to use. In other words, translators wanted to break up with usability issues
rather than the technology itself. Most of the break-up letters did not signal a
desire to get rid of a technological tool entirely. Instead, they were more narrowly
addressed to a “slow” or “erratic” Internet connection or to the translator’s com-
puter “when it’s acting up” (Koskinen & Ruokonen 2017).
There is indeed room for improvement in the usability and user experience
of translation tools in order to increase user satisfaction and efficiency in task
completion, and usability issues were also what the respondents ­appreciated in
 Chapter 7. Translation technology and affect 

their tools. In contrast, lack of efficiency and various kinds of system errors ranked
highest among negatively valued usability factors (Koskinen & Ruokonen 2017;
see also O’Brien et al. 2017). In technology-acceptance models it has been pos-
tulated that the user’s willingness to use a particular tool or system depends on
the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, and that attitudes and emo-
tions towards technology are a central element of the belief that using a particular
system will be fairly effortless (Venkatesh & Bala 2008). Emotions, attitudes and
(perceived) usability all interact and influence the acceptance and adoption of new
technology. Obviously, usability issues are not only perceived but can be very real.
Research has repeatedly and over a stretch of time confirmed that translators have
not felt their needs and preferences being prioritized in the development of trans-
lation technology (Lagoudaki 2008; Moorkens and O’Brien 2017). This has been
found to result in cognitive friction, that is, an interrupted sense of flow in task
completion, causing irritation to translators working in a heavily technologized
environment (O’Brien et al. 2017).
Another approach to the desire to break up with technology that fails to per-
form as the user would see fit is to analyse the co-operation between man and
machine as a dance of agency. This concept was first developed by Andrew Picker-
ing (1995) to analyse the interaction of human and non-human agents. It was first
applied to translation technology use by Maeve Olohan (2011), and it has later also
been applied by Cadwell et al. (2018) as well as Ruokonen and Koskinen (2017).
For Pickering, the dance of machinic and human agency is a progressive temporal
process of resistance, accommodation and technological development. Technol-
ogy offers resistance when it fails to function in the way expected by users. Users
may then have to accommodate their own behaviour to find a way to bypass the
problem. Patching or updating will eventually lead to an accommodation of tech-
nology. This pattern of resistance and accommodation – the dance of agency – is
the driving force behind scientific and technological innovations. In contrast to
the progressive trajectory of Pickering’s model, the human and machinic agents in
our love and break-up letter data seemed more entangled and in constant move-
ment with one another (Ruokonen & Koskinen 2017). We first analysed how many
of the 106 letters on technology assigned some agency to it, and then focused on
this subgroup of letters to analyse whether the human and machinic agents were
seen as convergent and moving in the same direction, or divergent and pulling in
different directions. We further analysed whether these two types were appraised
positively or negatively in the accounts, and whether the translators assigned a
dominant role to themselves or the machines.
In spite of the letter genre that personifies addressees, the results indicated
some reluctance in perceiving technology as agentic. The majority of the 61 letters
that did so fell into either convergent/positive (n = 20) or divergent/negative group
 Translation and Affect

(n = 32), that is, they were praising technology when it functions according to the
user’s wishes and blaming it if it does not. This signals the desire for the human
to be the leading partner in the dance. The modern translation work, however, is
turning this around; in post-editing, for example, the MT technology takes the
lead, and the human is expected to follow. This post-anthropocentric move alters
our identity as humans and undermines translatorial expertise. In light of this
immanent shift across the translation industry, the most interesting implications
of our data came from the handful of letters where the dance of agency emerged as
a more complex phenomenon and which drew attention to unanticipated affects
such as liking to be lead astray by technology or getting annoyed at a too-compli-
ant tool. These respondents reported a tool’s divergent agency as a welcome sup-
port, or an influence that made the human user’s work more varied and enjoyable.
Conversely, too passive or compliant a tool was seen to create trouble and annoy-
ance. These outlier responses signal a necessity to move away from overly simpli-
fied man-versus-machine conceptions so that we can fully capture the intricate
interplay of human and machinic forces in contemporary translation workplaces
(Ruokonen & Koskinen 2017: 321).
We were surprised to see that practising translators wrote love letters to
technology more frequently than the translation students. Previous research
(Dillon & Fraser 2006: 68; Marshman & Bowker 2012: 76) has suggested that the
youngest cohort (between 21 and 30 in our data, and consisting mainly but not
only of students) would be the keenest to engage with modern technology, but
we did not find this to be the case for our respondents. The student group is also
the only one in which break-up letters outnumbered love letters, which therefore
makes them the cohort expressing the most disaffection both in general and
also towards technology. This may be accidental: as professional translators were
more willing to write two letters than the student respondents, they ended up
expressing a more balanced snapshot of both their positive and negative views.
But the tendency towards break-up letters rather than love letters in the student
group may also signal an important affective trend of which we may wish to
take notice: in the entire sample of letters, students stand out as the group that
expresses the most worry about the profession and its future, and also of their
own future as part of it (Koskinen 2014b: 82). This may reflect their precarious
position compared to those who already have found their professional foothold,
but the results also raise questions as to whether future workplaces are being
painted in an overly negative light in the training institutions, how translation
educators approach technology (MT in particular) and how much attention is
given to students’ emotional wellbeing and attachment to their future profession
during their studies.
 Chapter 7. Translation technology and affect 

7.2 Machine translation and affects

Machine translation received limited attention in the love and break-up letters,
and the only group where it was highlighted (as a potentially threatening new tool)
was that of students. This was somewhat unexpected, given that the EU data was
collected around a time of large-scale integration of MT into the institutional in-
house TM systems.28 The fact that respondents did not highlight MT as an item to
write about is all the more unexpected as the EU translator dataset was collected
in conjunction with a lecture on the future of translation (technology) which in
itself was priming the EU respondents towards selecting technology objects (and
machine translation naturally featured significantly in the lecture). The new MT
tool was not immediately loved, but neither was it seen as a source of fear or threat.
In the literature, the discourse of threat is often prominent, either as a phenom-
enon empirically identified (Cadwell et al. 2018) or as an assumption the author
works against (see, e.g., Bywood et al. 2017). Results from the letter data paint a
much less dramatic picture of translators’ attitudes towards machine translation.
To explore current attitudes towards machine translation in social media,
Läubli and Orrego-Carmona (2017) conducted a qualitative analysis of transla-
tors’ discourse on Facebook groups and on LinkedIn and then classified a set of
13,150 tweets about MT with the help of an automated sentiment analysis tool
(it was not entirely clear from the article whether the tweets were also authored
by translators). While the qualitative data indicated a tendency towards predomi-
nantly negative attitudes, the more extensive Twitter data seems to have been more
balanced, as neutral tweets were found to be the most common subset. Still, the
authors report that there were three times more negative tweets than positive ones,
which the authors interpreted as an indication of negative perceptions being more
dominant than positive ones. They are no doubt correct, but the interpretation
needs to be qualified by the memetic nature of social media where a dramatic fail-
ure is much more retweetable than incremental improvements of MT. Translators’
lives are currently most affected by post-editing tasks, that is, processes through
which raw MT results are revised to reach adequate level of accuracy and textual
quality. It has been found that the cognitive effort required to produce a usable
text via post-editing varies, and not all scenarios make it worthwhile to do so

. One partial explanation may be found in the predominance of Finnish respondents as
two of the four subgroups consisted of those with Finnish as one of their working languages.
In 2014, and still at the time of writing at the end of 2018, machine translation solutions have
not penetrated the Finnish translation market in a significant degree as the technology has
been slow to accommodate to the fairly small and syntactically complex language.
 Translation and Affect

­(Koponen 2016). These experiences may well be reflected in translators’ sarcas-

tic or ironic tweets that laugh at the failures of MT, and they may easily lead the
observer to overinterpret the sender’s cynical and negative approach. Indeed, it has
been found that irony may be a normal feature of organizational talk in ambiguous
and difficult situations, creating space for dealing with contradictory demands by
allowing for some distance to official policies and normative expectations (Koski-
nen 2008: 118; Hatch 1997: 281). Cynical humour has been identified as a legiti-
mate expression of felt ambiguities and therefore a positive force: it enables the
speakers to recognize the contradictory nature of their work lives without having
to attempt to resolve the contradictions; it allows “unresolvables, irreconcilables,
and untenables to remain unresolved” (Meyerson 1991: 141). A number of factors
may explain the overrepresentation of negative posts in the data, and direct causal
links between posts classified as negative and the actual, more durable affective
stance or perception of the author need to be drawn with caution.
Social media provides an affectively laden environment that facilitates emo-
tional involvement and identity performances. These performances are realized
through affective labour and directed at designated affective publics (Abdel-
Fadil 2019). In the social media context, the combination of needing to allevi-
ate anxieties concerning machine translation through sarcasm and to touch an
affective chord that will allow one’s tweet to be noticed, appreciated and shared
will easily make it irresistible to post hilarious MT blunders. Classifying them
into boxes of negative/positive is bound to be a crude approximation that will
unavoidably miss the subtleties of argumentation. Still, the result that shows
such prominence of negative affect towards MT is significant. Hype is clearly
overshadowed by doubts.
Laughing at MT is also a good reminder of the wonderfully hilarious and
fun uses it has been put to by people’s creativity. A great example of this playful-
ness are, for example, karaoke shows based on retour translating song lyrics with
an MT tool and then trying to fit the resulting gibberish into the music.29 These
kinds of activities have increased the cultural visibility of translation in a play-
ful style that can be linked to a wider cultural shift in translation and affect that
Yves Gambier (2012) has described as a movement from the denial to the desire
to translate. While technology has, for some, began to render human translation
obsolete, it has also enabled a cultural revival of translation in technology-assisted
platforms that unite engaged fans and volunteers in donating their time and affec-
tion through translating (see also Section 6.2.3 above).

. See, e.g., The Tonight Show at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GC83w0z0ec (viewed

19.10.2019)
 Chapter 7. Translation technology and affect 

In discussions of machine translation in the context of professional transla-

tion, negative affects such as fear, anxiety and worry tend to dominate, but the
discourse also tends to implicitly or explicitly push translators into adopting more
acceptable (i.e., positive and optimistic) affective stances. Stepping beyond profes-
sional use allows us to also appreciate the societal promise of MT. In addition to
being fun, MT is also virtuous. The utopian prospect of MT, of free access and
instantaneous availability of fully automated, directly usable high-quality MT,
would radically democratize multilingual communication, empowering users.
Already now it is delivering a lot of that promise by allowing people to access
the information they need or want, independently and instantaneously across lan-
guage barriers. Professional translators understandably focus on the effect of MT
on themselves, and not everybody is affectionate about the changes it is bringing.
An empathetic view of what raw MT, rudimentary or not, is offering to many user
groups who never had the resources to be clients of professional translators will
allow for a more balanced stance.
Läubli and Orrego-Carmona’s article focuses on MT attitudes, but their
method also gives readers a peek into the current capabilities of sentiment analy-
sis in automated recognition of affects in text. It is clear that this method is not
yet very sophisticated, but their methodology also shows that the human assess-
ment that was used to train the engine is equally fallible, especially in reaching
a consensus in identifying sarcastic and ironic tones. This is not a minor point.
Social media genres are known for their affective loadedness and for the chal-
lenges of correctly interpreting and responding to the affects expressed by others
as well as expressing one’s own. For automated sentiment analysis to be functional,
it will need to outperform human assessors, not only in terms of amounts of data
but also in terms of interpreting it. Based on the conflicting interpretations of the
human assessors employed by Läubli and Orrego-Carmona, humans are not nec-
essarily as far ahead as one might optimistically assume.

7.3 Future scenarios

It can be argued that technology is the repressed other that motivated the writing of
this book. My not-so-hidden agenda across this monograph is to argue that trans-
lation studies should foreground elements that machines are not yet able to master
and that are therefore still the domain of human translators. Hence the focus on
analysing, modulating and performing affects. At the same time, it seems prudent
to acknowledge that deep-learning artificial intelligence is likely to improve in its
ability to identify and interpret user emotions as well, and the next major steps in
translation technology may well be taken in the area of affective computing, a field
 Translation and Affect

that studies the connecting points of computing and emotion and aims to create
new technological tools for measuring and communicating emotion.
Affective computing is a vast field, and I do not claim to know it well. Even
a rudimentary understanding, however, reveals many contact points between
translation and currently available solutions. For example, sentiment analysis and
opinion mining from large volumes of text discussed in the previous section is a
business tool already used to uncover emotional tones and to extract information
on people’s attitudes on social media sites or in customer feedback systems, creat-
ing lucrative business opportunities. Similarly, machine recognition of emotions
in speech is already being used to support call centre workers to keep up signalling
positive emotions through a smiling voice across the workday and to detect the
mood of the caller through their tone of voice. Call centres have been known to
be early adopters of new technology. But so is the translation industry. I have no
knowledge of emotion recognition software being currently used in remote inter-
preting, for example, but the idea makes obvious sense and will surely be adopted
at some point. There is a lot of hype around this area of research, while even fairly
simplistic manipulations have been reported to result in misinterpretations by the
tool (such as adding the word “love” to a sentence that would otherwise be inter-
preted as hate speech; Gröndahl et al. 2018). However, it is not so long ago that
machine translation seemed like a too-hyped and unrealistic endeavour, while it
is now rapidly developing into a mainstream asset of translation work. It seems
only logical to assume that insights from natural-language processing and affec-
tive computing might well prove useful for translation technology applications
as well, eventually bringing an artificial emotional intelligence into the systems
used for multilingual communication. To be able to make the most of the results
of this emerging area of research, we also need to fine-tune our understanding of
the various human emotions involved in translating and interpreting. In effect,
whether we expect computers to take over multilingual communication entirely,
or whether we believe humans to be needed to master the human – that is, sub-
jective and intersubjective – elements of natural languages and the movement
between them, the argument for an accentuated understanding of the complexi-
ties of the affective remains.
In the current AI scene, neural machine translation is often hailed as the great-
est achievement so far, trumping other well-known projects such as self-driving
cars or social robots. It is indeed undeniable that neural machine translation is
currently making fast and significant headway, but it is also realistic to assume it
will eventually plateau in a way similar to its predecessor statistical machine trans-
lation technology. What level of sophistication it will reach and how well affective
computing will eventually be integrated with machine translation are open ques-
tions, but for the time being it is also reasonable to believe that translation will be
 Chapter 7. Translation technology and affect 

a dance of human and machinic agency in the future as well. In that tango, the
machine is likely to continue to take on a larger role, but also to continue to be
better at routine, repetitive tasks, whereas bringing newness to the communicative
context is more likely to remain the task of the human partner. This will often be a
result of affective reasoning.
This newness factor is not a minor point. Translation is not only about sourc-
ing existing textual evidence and matching expressions in two languages. It is
also a creative process of finding unexpected cultural similarities, spanning the
boundaries of linguistic expression and judging the necessities of a particular
communicative context and adapting the message accordingly. It is no accident
that among the fundamentals of translating, tried and tested in numerous empiri-
cal studies of human translation in different genres and across historical periods
and cultures, one finds such basic strategies as addition, omission and pragmatic
adaptations. The computer does not excel in this kind of contextualized strategic
decision-making. In fact, the foundational principle of machine translation is the
repetition of the commonly used. Importantly, it devours and recycles translation
solutions produced outside the realm of automated translation, feeding on human
translations it is designed to replace. This logic is common to much of contempo-
rary internet content: it comments, retweets and recycles products and ideas cre-
ated in and by old cultural institutions whose business models and legitimization
the internet culture is dismantling (Lanier 2011: 122; for a prominent example of
this mash-up culture, see the discussion on video clip subtitling in Section 6.2.3
above). As opposed to human translators, who will be able to adapt to chang-
ing contexts and create new communicative solutions, MT will provide fast but
stable solutions and standardization. The more widely raw MT is used, the more
common misunderstandings and ensuing conflicts will also be. These errors, as
opposed to those made by individual human translators, are instantly scalable. It
is easy to see that in addition to the post-editors currently employed to reshape
machine-generated translations before they are released so that these conflicts can
be avoided, in the not-so-distant future new business opportunities will arise in
the area of sorting out problems that have already occurred, these translation crisis
and risk managers joining the already vast army of support personnel occupying
“the Planet of the Help Desk” that Jaron Lanier (2011: 94), an Internet pioneer
turned critical thinker, foresees as the solution for meaningful employment in the
techno-future full of computer programs that are by nature “endlessly confusing,
buggy, tangled, fussy, and error-ridden”.
Similar to translation strategies, another staple in translation studies litera-
ture is the perennial question of translation quality and its assessment. Product
quality has proven notoriously difficult to define, leading to simplified matrices
and error listings in the management of translations and translators in agencies,
 Translation and Affect

and a focus on process quality rather than product quality in ISO standardization.
The relative lack of theorizing translation quality from radically divergent angles
may be a signal of something essential: the je-ne-sais-pas-quoi elements of elegant
and appealing translations that we are delighted to encounter but struggle to put
our finger to and that resist standardization are perhaps precisely the reason why
human translation still matters. The elusiveness of quality definitions may well be
a factor that underlines their importance.
In machine translation research, the main bulk of literature focuses on efforts
in evaluating and improving the quality of MT output. This is not surprising, as
quality variation in MT output is much wider than in professional human trans-
lation (Doherty 2017: 134), ranging from perfectly acceptable raw MT to useless
material that cannot be salvaged by any post-editing efforts save full and com-
plete retranslation from scratch. A standard method to assess MT success is to
compare it to human translation. Among others, this is the logic of BLEU, the
dominant form of MT evaluation in the translation industry (Doherty 2017: 137).
The set-up is built on the expectation for the machine to achieve quality levels as
close to human as possible. In computer science, a classic measurement of artifi-
cial intelligence is the Turing test, first proposed by Alan Turing. The basic idea is
to create an experiment where a human does not know whether they are convers-
ing with another human or a computer. If the tester mistakes the computer for a
human, we know that computers will have reached the maturity that matches or
supersedes the human brain. The trick is that there are two ways to this outcome:
either the machine’s performance improves or the tester lowers their standards on
human intelligence (Lanier 2011: 30–33). In MT evaluation, we have an identi-
cal situation. There are two ways in which the MT programme may come out as
the winner: either it gets good enough to overcome its human counterpart, or
we lower our expectations on human translation output until it matches what
the computer can produce. This latter scenario will give the MT programmers a
Pyrrhic victory.
This scenario is not too far from what is already happening in an industry
that has, for the best part of the 21st century, focused on using technology to
increase the speed, to lower the cost and to standardize the products of transla-
tion. This phenomenon is part of a wider downward spiral in digitalized environ-
ments. Jaron Lanier talks about “the digital flattening of expression into a global
mush” (2011: 47) and warns that we are already now constantly degrading our-
selves to make machines look smart (ibid.: 32). It is easy to see how this is also
already happening with translation technology: in order to accept the segmen-
tation capabilities of translation memory tools, for example, human translators
routinely forfeit their superior cognitive skills in processing long bits of coherent
text, and in order to accommodate the rudimentary abilities of automated ­quality
 Chapter 7. Translation technology and affect 

assessment tools and the cumbersome communication channels of modern net-

worked and digitalized translation industry, they refrain from proposing radi-
cal restructurings of text, let alone omissions, to avoid them being signalled as
errors or leading to lengthy (unpaid) explanation and negotiation rounds with
the project manager. In effect, this is not too far from Lanier’s dystopic view of
the digitalized world that is “making people obsolete so that computers seem
more advanced” (ibid.: 27). People can make themselves obsolete also through
deskilling. This was already briefly discussed in the context of codes of conduct
but deserves to be highlighted here as well. Machine translation has a similar
effect on two grounds: first, it contributes to the decline in learning foreign lan-
guages by creating an expectation of mutual monolingualism being overcome
by machinic support, and second, it reduces the professional translator to a sup-
portive role and creates expectations of technological competence over linguistic,
cultural and translation competence.
In this scenario, we will all lose. For in spite of all the hype of fully automated
machine translation, the computer is entirely dependent on human translation
input in its operations, as at least for now it needs to be fed massive amounts of
pre-existing human translations for it to learn and to perform. It follows that we
are increasingly witnessing a new scenario where translation agencies are being
transformed from translation providers to language data markets, reselling their
translation data for MT development purposes. For translators, this opens up new
ethical and business considerations about whether they have any say as to where
and how many times their translations are sold, and at what price they are willing
to accept that. The current digital businesses are not structured in ways that are
fair to content providers, as Lanier (2011) repeatedly reminds us. This also holds
for translation industry.
It also follows that the more limited the human translation input is, the more
limited the expressive abilities of the computer will also be. More importantly, the
cultural loss of human creativity, and the loss of translators’ (as well as authors’)
individual voices into digital mush will make us all poorer and our cultural prod-
ucts flatter. Or so the current assumptions go. But perhaps the computers will
outsmart us on the artistic side as well. Many commentators are positing literary
translation, and poetry in particular, as the final frontier of human translation.
This depends on what kind of poetry we are talking about, and on what kind of
aesthetic expectations we have for its translation strategies. For particular kinds of
innovative and experimental poetry, machine translation may well open up new
interpretive spaces (Nabugodi 2014).
So, what can one say about the current and future state of translation tech-
nology? Misery and splendour. The familiar binarism re-emerges. The prom-
ises of MT are great: from serving in routine tasks to democratizing interlingual
 Translation and Affect

c­ommunication and to creating new expressive avenues. But the maladies are
equally great: flattening of our texts and language resources, multilingual cri-
sis management, unemployed translators, loss of language learning. The choice
between positive and negative affects is unstable and deferred. It seems that in
today’s globalized world that needs to constantly operate multilingually, machine
translation is an undecidable pharmakon. It is the cure and the poison in the same
bottle (Derrida 1968/1981).
 chapter 8

Affect and pedagogy

Reflexivity, empathy and empowerment

The main rationale running across this entire book is the view of translating and
interpreting as affective labour. Logically, the acceptance of this view also has con-
sequences for translator education. All previous chapters contain elements that
can be integrated into the training modules for translators and interpreters. This
chapter discusses some of the more general pedagogical principles of an affec-
tive view on translator education, and they are accompanied by some practical
teaching methods that I have developed over the years for my own courses. These
methods could perhaps be best described as tools for supporting the formation of
affectively competent and empowered professionals and for helping them foster
their flexibility, empathy and reflexivity, and hence also their professional wellbe-
ing, hopefully throughout their career.
One can perhaps more easily see the relevance of such “character-­building”
elements in primary education. The neuroscientific view of affects has also
prompted Antonio Damasio (see Chapter 1), together with a colleague, to con-
tribute to the discussions on education from that perspective:
In fact, one could argue that the chief purpose of education is to cultivate chil-
dren’s building of repertoires of cognitive and behavioral strategies and options,
helping them to recognize the complexity of situations and to respond in increas-
ingly flexible, sophisticated, and creative ways. In our view, out of these processes
of recognizing and responding, the very processes that form the interface be-
tween cognition and emotion, emerge the origins of creativity – the artistic, sci-
entific, and technological innovations that are unique to our species. Further, out
of these same kinds of processing emerges a special kind of human innovation:
the social creativity that we call morality and ethical thought.
(Immordino-Yang & Damasio 2007: 7)

Creativity and ethical thought are the cornerstones of the future translation profes-
sion. Immordino-Yang and Damasio discuss primary education but to my mind
the above quotation also sums up nicely many aims of affectively attuned trans-
lator and interpreter education, where repertoires of sophisticated and ­creative
 Translation and Affect

s­trategies as well as social creativity for complex situations need to be built, and
morality and ethical thought also need to be fostered. One could argue that becom-
ing and being a translator, too, takes place at the interface between cognition and
emotion. In addition to human agents, this interface will, and indeed already does,
include increasingly intelligent and learning technology (see Chapter 7). In today’s
and tomorrow’s translation industry, routine equivalence-based translation is
increasingly executed by machine translation tools, assisted by human transla-
tors. The areas where human touch will still be needed in the foreseeable future
are related to elements such as intuition, creativity, emotions and ethics. During
the past decades, educators have focused on bringing the latest technology into
the classroom, and on getting themselves and their students up to speed with the
rapidly changing technological landscapes of the translation industry. The next
challenge will be to shift training to models that still foster an understanding of
the technology (which will keep changing) but at the same time re-emphasize and
kindle the transformative power of human creativity and reinforce the moral rea-
soning skills and empathic intuition of the students. This, I argue, will require
integrating affects firmly within translator and interpreter education.
The multitude of connections between affects, embodiment, questions of
space and place and many other issues raised in this book and their repercussions
to translator education are a topic too vast to be covered within one chapter. In
the following, I will focus on two central themes: empathy and empowerment.
Specifically, I will discuss how these two can be enhanced, based on my own prac-
tical experiences in the classroom since 2001.30 I do not claim the exercises pre-
sented below are radically new or unique. In all likelihood, many educators are
quite intuitively incorporating similar elements in their classrooms. This chapter
does not aim to showcase best practices, but rather to give an opportunity for
those involved in translator and interpreter training to reflect on their current
pedagogical practice and perhaps get some new ideas that are not too complicated
to integrate into existing modules.
A decisive influence in how this chapter was organized and where its focus
lies comes from my involvement in two projects linked to translator training in
the University of Eastern Finland. First, in 2011–2013 I was a partner in Pro-
moting Intercultural Competence for Translators, an EU-funded project aiming to

. This focus limits the discussion to translator training only, leaving out the training of
professional interpreters for the simple reason that I have not been involved in that. Educa-
tors working in that field will hopefully find relevant contact points and parallels to draw on.
It is also my understanding that in interpreter training the embodied and the emotive have
already been integrated into classroom activities much more comprehensively than in trans-
lator training (see, e.g., Merlini 2015).
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

provide translation teachers with readily accessible teaching materials to support

the training of future professional translators in the area of intercultural compe-
tence. The second project, a four-year (2015–2019) language revitalization proj-
ect Kiännä (“Translation, revitalization and the endangered Karelian language”)
was an initiative to participate in revitalizing Karelian, an endangered minority
language spoken in Finland and Russia, by organizing seminars and workshops
on professional translation skills and competences for speakers and learners of
Karelian dialects from both countries. In it, my role was fairly minor; as a mem-
ber of the steering group and a field researcher during its first year of operation
I had a peripheral position in the activities and course design. Below, neither
of these two projects is discussed in detail. The materials designed for PICT
are still all available online, and a reader interested in intercultural competence
can turn to the website or other documentation provided by the team (PICT
n.d.; Tomozeiu et al. 2016). The lessons learned in Kiännä are being published
gradually by the team, and the pedagogical insights will be mainly targeted at
those working in revitalization contexts and with non-professional translators31
whereas the implied reader I have in mind for this current chapter is someone
interested in the university training of professional translators. The influence of
these two projects is more fundamental. Distilling the main take-away from these
two projects into mainstream translator education gives me two terms with clear
affective overtones: the key to translators’ interpersonal and intercultural compe-
tence, I now think, is empathy, and the core concept in the context of voluntary
L2 translation and language activism such as in Kiännä is empowerment. These
two are also key to translator training for today and tomorrow. The relevance of
empathy in contemporary translator and interpreter education, along with the
ways in which it can be enhanced in students, is discussed in Section 8.2. Empow-
erment will be elaborated on in Section 8.3.
The first section of this chapter (Section 8.1) deals with reflexivity. I see it as
a foundational element in both empathy and empowerment in professional prac-
tice. Empathy without reflexivity is blind, and empowerment without reflexivity
is dangerous. Reflexivity is also a crucial prerequisite of ethical practice, both for
practitioners and trainers. This was also the main take-away from my PhD thesis
(Koskinen 2000), based on theoretical contemplation. Since then I have learned
to appreciate the challenges and shortcomings of reflexivity in real-life situations
both as a practising translator and as a translator trainer, moving from theory to
praxis. With hindsight I can see that the consecutive involvement in these two

. For more on Kiännä, see Koskinen, Kuusi and Riionheimo (2017), Koskinen and Kuusi
(2017) and Kuusi, Koskinen and Riionheimo (2019).
 Translation and Affect

projects mentioned above allowed me to broaden my vision of translator train-

ing in contexts that were either more global (PICT) or more local (Kiännä) than
my regular environment. Otherwise I have mainly been involved in strictly pro-
fessionally oriented translator education, and apart from brief visits, only in the
context of Finnish universities. As the PICT group needed to negotiate between
five different training realities from five different countries, the project gave me
opportunities to encounter and critically reflect on the national-cultural bias of
my thinking that had been created by my exposure to a particular historical tra-
jectory of translator education and disciplinary development. Kiännä, in turn,
helped me become aware of the limits of the professional focus I had largely taken
for granted. As Kiännä aimed to foster professional translation competences in a
language that has virtually no translation market and very few translation tools,
and to train translation competences for participants with varying degrees of lan-
guage skills, it forced everyone involved to reassess their preconceived ideas of
what translator training is and should be about, and for whom. Reflexivity such
as the kind these projects pushed me towards, is a necessary component of any
educator’s skill set. It is also a competence students need to develop in order to
assess where they stand, whose side they are on and what their actions are doing
in the world.
Focusing on the concepts of reflexivity, empathy and empowerment, this
chapter offers a number of ideas on how to enhance students’ abilities to identify,
reflect on, manage and strategically use their affective resources in and beyond
the classroom. Section 8.3 will also include a discussion of a continued education
workshop for professional translators. In translator and interpreter education lit-
erature the emphasis has firmly been on training students to become professionals,
but in a rapidly changing world it is more and more obvious that learning needs
to take place continuously for professionals to navigate changing career paths and
to support continuous growth and motivation. Before discussing empathy and
empowerment, I will begin with the concept of reflexivity, building on Michael
Burawoy’s ideas of the division of academic labour (Section 8.1). This discussion
will also be linked to critical pedagogy, an overarching pedagogical framework
well suited for dialogic and reflexive teaching methods.

8.1 Reflexivity as a foundational skill

Many translator educators would agree that students may exhibit affective stances
that we consider unhelpful or immature and that we therefore try to change. We
may find them less than optimally motivated, too quick to judge, or thin-skinned
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

and poor at taking criticism, for example. Educators’ own affects, in contrast, are
a more rarely revealed aspect of teaching, but this does not mean they live an
affect-less life in the lecture halls and classrooms. On the contrary, educators have
positive or negative affects towards students, towards texts worked on, towards
theories discussed, technical tools, colleagues, the institutional context and terms
of contract, and so on. Educators also enter the classroom with positive or negative
affective stances accumulated elsewhere: at home, during the morning jog or while
stuck in traffic, in departmental meetings, or coffee room discussions. Finally, in
and through teaching, educators wish to affect students in the sense of instigat-
ing changes in them. The affective stances of everyone involved create a particu-
lar kind of energy field in the classroom, and it has a bearing on how successful
the teaching and learning encounter turns out to be. While students are taught
to deal with the emotions and affects involved in the translation or interpreting
practice in a constructive manner, educators need to be aware of the same need
for themselves.
I have become convinced that the key to success in both students’ and edu-
cators’ life (and translators’ and interpreters’, for that matter) is reflexivity.32 It is
an essential skill to teach to our students, and also something teachers need to
practice for themselves. Reflexion is needed on any aspect of education. Follow-
ing the theme of this book, the focus here is on being reflexive about affects. This
emphasis is not just an afterthought or a handy twist to create coherence between
chapters in this book. The origin for this emphasis actually stems from my own
development as a university teacher. My own academic path took an affective turn
about a decade ago, and my current understanding of the centrality of affect can
be traced back to this personal experience of a career crisis. It had been brought
about by two simultaneous neoliberal developments, one towards privatizing the
universities and commodifying education (still in full swing, and even aggra-
vated), with the concomitant plight of the humanities in general and languages in
particular, and the other towards corporatization, globalization and industrializa-
tion of professional translation (that we now call the translation industry), with its
concomitant problems related to outsourcing, competitive bidding and a race to
the bottom, accompanied and also led by technological developments, particularly
the introduction of CAT tools (see Section 6.2.1). The result for me and many of
my colleagues was that while we were struggling to understand and to cope with
the university reforms and the constant demands for restructuring the training we

. In the literature one finds both reflexivity and reflectivity, with different definitions and
sometimes used interchangeably. I follow Burawoy’s usage.
 Translation and Affect

provide,33 we also needed to deal with the growing disillusionment of our s­ tudents
who were trying to come to terms with facing the prospect of a professional life
very different from their earlier expectations (see also Koskinen 2010b). The
affects were overwhelming. To deal with the resulting emotional stress, I needed
to become more reflexive about my own academic life and professional well-being.
This lived experience helped me transfer my academic interest in the value of self-
reflexivity (Koskinen 2000) to an increasingly explicit agenda for accounting for
the ways in which our subjective experiences and social positions affect our teach-
ing, research and translation practice.
In a crisis situation, the affective level tends to be on overdrive, and the sticki-
ness and catchiness of affects is amply on display. That was definitely the case for
me. I was losing the sense of a meaningful future in the academia and therefore
also my motivation, and I repeatedly found myself thinking of leaving the uni-
versity and pursuing some other career. An accidental encounter with a Finnish
translation of Michael Burawoy’s presidential address to the American Sociological
Association in 2004 on public sociology was a turning point for me. His discussion
of the four different approaches to doing sociology, and his call for re-invigorating
his discipline’s commitment to social causes by reinforcing research efforts centred
on public dialogue allowed me to also reflect on my discipline and, in particular,
to recalibrate my own academic activities in the light of Burawoy’s ideas of public
engagement and dialogic research designs. I was able to acknowledge and value
my affects while also responding to them in constructive and meaningful ways. As
a result, during the past decade I have exhibited exit, voice and loyalty (Hirschman
1970; see also Chapter 6) in my search for a reasonable fit between my academic
values and the institutional context of work, reconsidered my research agenda and
taken the contemporary professional landscapes of translating and interpreting
as an object of study, reinforced my ties to the professional world of translation
and interpreting, enhanced my emotion management skills in terms of engaging
with student worries and reassessed my personal language policy in publications
(increasing my efforts to publish my research in Finnish to counterbalance the
current fad of only valuing publications in English).
My adaptation of Burawoy’s (2005) model into translation studies has
been explained in detail before (Koskinen 2010b), and so have its pedagogical
­implications (Koskinen 2012b). Here, I will only provide a brief overview and then

. In my current university, translator training has been entirely redesigned in 2005, 2008,
2012 and 2019. At the same time, the number of staff has been reduced by approximately
one-third. As a consequence, entry to university posts has become more and more difficult,
and the young generations of teachers and researchers are finding themselves in increasingly
precarious positions while also required to constantly remodel the context of their teaching
and re-invent themselves to fit the changing environment.
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

focus on the issue of reflexivity. Burawoy has divided the field of sociology into
four subfields: professional, critical, policy and public sociology. Each is charac-
terized by a particular combination of audience (academic vs. extra-academic)
and type of knowledge (instrumental vs. reflexive). The resulting matrix of the
four subfields is shown in Table 3. Although Burawoy addresses his own field, the
matrix is adaptable to any discipline. As it works as a typology of academic labour,
it also functions as a tool for self-reflection. I have successfully used it in PhD
seminars, where it allows participants to reflect on where they locate themselves
in the four fields and to understand why others operating within other quadrants
may approach their research design, aims and motivations in a completely differ-
ent manner.

Table 3. Division of academic labour (Burawoy 2005)

Academic audience Extra-academic audience

Instrumental knowledge Professional Policy

Reflexive knowledge Critical Public

The two quadrants on the left form the academic axis of sociology. Professional
sociology is the scientific field of empirical and theoretical explorations, guided
by scientific norms and assessed by peer review. It is the source of tested meth-
ods, accumulated knowledge, orienting questions and conceptual frameworks. It
is the sine qua non for all the other subfields, and its knowledge is instrumental to
them, as they build on reflecting on and disseminating knowledge produced by
professional sociology (Burawoy 2005: 10; for a critique see Arribas Lozano 2017:
10–11). Its pathologies include rigidity and hermetic closedness to the world,
focusing on abstract empiricism or grand theorizing. Its values and research agen-
das thus need to be constantly re-examined and renewed by critical sociology, the
heart and the collective conscience of the discipline (Burawoy 2005: 10–11). The
pathology of excessive critical sociology, then, is dogmatism, the rote repetition
of accepted ideological arguments instead of active critical and reflexive involve-
ment. These two subfields are rooted firmly within academia, and they address
academic audiences.
The two subfields located in the other vertical axis of the matrix address extra-
academic audiences. Policy sociology is the pragmatic service sector, providing
research-based practical solutions to the problems of its clients (policy makers,
organizations, corporations). In policy sociology, the needs and wishes of the
clients are allowed to mould the research agenda, and its pathology is therefore
servility and subordination. The more critical and reflexive approach to interact-
ing with extra-academic audiences is called public sociology. It is based on a dia-
logic and activist mode of engaging in conversation with the local communities
 Translation and Affect

outside academia and co-creating new thick knowledge together with designated
“publics” through interventions, activities and co-designed research agendas. The
pathologies of public sociology include populism and faddishness – and, as some
of Burawoy’s critics have pointed out, politization (Arribas Lozano 2017: 3). Public
sociology can be practiced in its traditional and unidirectional form, which used
to be called popularizing, and Burawoy argues for its continued need. At the same
time, it is clear that his main emphasis is on organic public sociologies where the
approach is more dialogic, allowing knowledge to also flow from the publics to
the academic quadrants of the matrix. Although Burawoy is openly advocating
for public sociology (also my earlier writings are explicitly written in favour of
the public quadrant), any discipline will need to have a balanced combination of
all four. Burawoy (2005: 4, 2015) describes these four subfields as antagonistically
interdependent: their tasks, aims and the values they are based on are different,
and ideological and pragmatic tensions therefore often exist between them, but a
healthy disciplinary progress requires them all to be equally vibrant and in balance
with one another. Excessive emphasis on any one field of the matrix may push it
towards developing a pathological form.
Different socio-cultural contexts and fields are differently placed in terms
of the public–policy divides. Within language departments, translator training
currently often carries the role of ticking various boxes of employability, market-
relevance and catering for societal and industry needs, making its ethos deci-
sively policy-oriented. This emphasis is also visible in the European Master’s of
Translation project, a European-Commission-led training initiative which has
been highly influential in harmonizing translator training in European universi-
ties towards an industry-oriented model. In this climate, pleas for an emphatic
public translation studies engagement in both education and in research are an
absolute necessity: If the goals are set by the employers alone, and if academics
only react to the existing (technology- and economy-driven) demands set by the
field, the training institution fails in its most fundamental task of educating new
generations to not only adapt to existing conditions, but also research, develop and
improve them. Instrumental knowledge easily dominates in translator training.
To balance the situation, conscious efforts in engaging with the axis of reflexive
knowledge are therefore highly relevant.
The divide between instrumental and reflexive knowledge in Burawoy’s model
resonates with a call for reflexivity. The lower horizontal quadrants of critical and
public sociology (or translation studies) are fundamentally reflexive. In the criti-
cal quadrant, the object of reflexive analysis is existing scientific work, and in the
public one it is the social world. In other words, the former aims to critically assess
academic achievements and reflexively redirect research activities if necessary; the
latter takes a critical view of the community it studies and aims to instigate ­positive
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

changes in it. In a programmatic paper (1998), Burawoy advances a reflexive model

of science that is based on engagement rather than on objectivizing detachment.
This engagement, and the idea of producing changes, requires a healthy dose of
reflexivity as what may seem like progress from one perspective may be a change
for the worse from another.
Reflexivity and critical thinking are therefore skills every professional needs
to cultivate. The public translation studies approach to teaching emphasizes the
role of the educator as a facilitator of independent critical thinking. This vision
has affinities with critical pedagogy (see also Koskinen 2012b). These affinities
have also been spelled out by Burawoy (n.d.), who lists prominent voices in critical
pedagogy such as Freire and bell hooks among his inspirations. Critical pedagogy
is not a fixed methodology but rather a loose label for a group of pedagogical prin-
ciples that include fostering the abilities of critical thinking, personal growth and
liberation, and participatory methods and dialogue. In his best-known work, Ped-
agogy of the Oppressed, originally published in Portuguese in 1974 and translated
into Finnish in 2005, Paolo Freire explains that critical education is to be based on
a problematizing approach and democratic dialogue. In the vocabulary of critical
pedagogy, dialogue relates to words, and “word” is a concept with two basic com-
ponents: reflection and action. Words without actions are verbalism, and words
without reflection lead to activism rather than praxis (Freire 2005: 95). The aim is
not only to describe and to critique, but also to take action, moving from knowl-
edge to praxis, that is, to a theoretically informed practice.
In the context of translator education, I understand critical pedagogy as a
tool to move the focus from practice to praxis, that is, from the instrumental-
ist focus on techniques and technologies of the current translation industry to
a framework that also allows for a critical reflection of these practices and their
effects and affects, and allows us to discuss elements such as personal growth or
liberation as fundamental goals of education. Becoming a professional should,
according to Freire (1998), never be seen as a matter of rote training and techni-
calities only. Rather, education is fundamentally a matter of self-formation and
of creating a historical and ethical understanding of both the society we live in
and our own position(s) in it. This kind of reflexive education will then lead to
transformative praxis.
But what about affect? Why bring reflexivity and critical thinking into a book
on affect? We can begin to answer these questions by looking at the horizontal
axis of reflexive knowledge in Burawoy’s matrix. Above, I already alluded to the
metaphor of heart with reference to critical sociology. Burawoy has given simi-
lar metaphors to all quadrants, identifying professional sociology with the brain,
policy sociology with hands, critical sociology with the heart, and public sociol-
ogy with the entire body. Among these bodily metaphors, I associate heart with
 Translation and Affect

affect, and the entire body with embodiment. This places the lower horizontal axis
in sharp focus for the purposes of the present topic. An affectively tuned transla-
tion pedagogy needs to be a combination of hearty critical thinking and full-body
immersion into worldly topics. According to Freire, (2005: 106) each era and each
society has its own “thematic universe”, consisting of lifestyles, practices, values,
conceptions, hopes and developmental needs. This thematic universe also creates
a particular space of affective energies. An embodied approach to the thematic
universe will allow students to practice engagement, critical reflexion and posi-
tion-taking in the real world, and work on the affects generated in the process,
while they are still sheltered by a student status and supported and mentored by
the teacher before entering the professional life.
Critical pedagogy and public translation studies both aim, in the end, at social
change, not merely personal and motivational change. While the inclusion of the
aspects discussed above may increase the motivation of the teacher or the stu-
dents, it not enough to be complacent and satisfied with only the gains in personal
motivation. Reflexivity on the affects of translation may bring more balanced pro-
fessional attitudes and create wellbeing at work, and that is fine. But on a more
fundamental level, interpreting the affects involved should be accompanied by
a desire to use that understanding wisely to also instigate changes in sub-opti-
mal practices. It is not enough to manage and survive the situations that leave us
affected; we also need to strive to affect, to engage with the transformative power
of affect.

8.2 Empathy and affect

Translation is a mediation profession, providing services to help others commu-

nicate across linguistic and cultural barriers. Success in this mediation task pre-
supposes an understanding of what the communicating participants are trying
to achieve and what the best ways of achieving this are. As I have argued before
(Koskinen 2015),34 a core element to be included in the training of interculturally
competent translators is therefore empathy. As a term, empathy originates from the

. The central focus of Koskinen 2015 is superdiversity, the growing complexity of cultural
affiliations in our societies, and the resulting increasingly pressing need for an empathetic
recalibration of cultural coding for each communicative context. To accommodate for super-
diversity, it is argued, translation pedagogy needs to be developed in a direction that enhances
students’ abilities for continued intercultural learning and reflexivity, and allows them to
develop their ability to constantly adjust their cultural and linguistic knowledge in real-time
communication (Messelink & ten Thije 2012: 81).
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

Greek word empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’), the ability to feel what the
other is feeling. It is an ability to identify, understand and resonate the emotions of
others, to put oneself in their shoes, that is, to temporarily suspend one’s own posi-
tion and imagine oneself in the position of the other. Translators’ and interpreters’
own shoes are prototypically placed in the middle ground of the communicative
event, and reflexive empathic practice is a tool that allows them to observe the
situation from both directions and to make informed and ethically robust choices
also when they encounter unexpected and challenging communicative situations.
Empathy is also, for now at least, what differentiates between human and machine
translators, and the need for empathetic translation will keep humans involved in
intercultural communication also in the foreseeable future. Translation as a mech-
anistic transfer of meaning may well soon become fully automated, but translation
as affective labour will still remain the task of human translators. Competence in
empathy will be an essential part of human translation, and empathy is therefore
at the heart of translators’ situational communicative competence.
I use the word empathy above as if its meaning was clear to all readers. It
is, however, yet another rather confused concept in the theoretical literature, and
researchers base their findings on competing understandings. Cuff et al. (2014) list
29 different definitions and also discuss the varied understandings of the relation-
ship between empathy and some other concepts, notably sympathy and compas-
sion. I find it helpful to see compassion as an emotion, and empathy as a set of
skills or practices that one can use in situations that evoke compassion. Empathy
can be seen to consist of several abilities: being attentive to the affective “tempera-
ture” of oneself and others, taking the other’s perspective, withholding judgement,
understanding how the other is feeling, communicating that understanding, and
being reflexive about one’s own feelings and the overall situation.
In this section I will discuss the possibilities of fostering empathy in translator
training. In doing so, I have found the following classification of different kinds of
ethics by the Finnish scholar Elisa Aaltola (2018) useful. She discusses:

1. projective and simulating empathy

2. cognitive empathy
3. affective empathy
4. embodied empathy and
5. reflexive empathy.

All five types of empathy are relevant for translation as affective labour. Here I will
discuss ways in which they can be taught in the context of formal translator train-
ing. First, projective and simulating empathy are two opposing ways of identify-
ing with the experiences of the other: one can either project oneself in the o ­ ther’s
 Translation and Affect

position (putting oneself in the shoes of the other; imagining how one would
feel if one was in that position) or simulate how it would feel to actually be the
other one in that position (Aaltola 2018: 30–32). The former is more ego-centric,
whereas the latter aims to capture the life-world of the other. Simulating empathy
can thus be seen as more valuable, but Aaltola emphasizes the pedagogical value
of both (ibid.: 33). They are important tools for learning to observe and assess the
positioning and perspective of the other. Narratives and stories have been iden-
tified as a great way to understand the qualities and context of the other. Liter-
ary translation exercises are also often well-liked by students. Among their many
benefits in a translation course one can add that it has been found that literature,
and by extension literary translation, supports enhancing skills in empathy and
emotion perception and expression (ibid.: 39; see also Hubscher-Davidson 2018:
200–201). Analysing and translating a well-selected fictional text that depicts the
inner thoughts and feelings of a character or the nuances of interpersonal relations
can be used to enhance projective and simulating empathy in students.
Practising projective and simulating empathy through narratives is useful,
but it has its limits. Projective empathy can foster affinities with the already famil-
iar at the expense of being truly open to otherness, and stories can also simplify
situations and reinforce existing stereotypes or prevailing ideologies (Aaltola
2018: 41). In trying to get into the head of the other, both projective and simulat-
ing empathy focus on otherness from an atomistically individuated perspective
and emphasize the mind over either the bodily felt or the contextual (ibid.: 44–45).
Here, embodied empathy can bring additional viewpoints. According to this con-
cept, empathy is also about bodies in movement, both spatially and in relation
to other bodies (ibid.: 76), highlighting the social embeddedness of the transla-
torial event. Embodied empathy also shifts the focus from rational knowing to
lived experience. My current teaching focuses on translation theory and research
skills. In this area, I have found exercises that expose students to fieldwork meth-
ods very beneficial for them, not only because ethnography has become one of
the regular methods employed in translation studies research, but also from the
perspective of embodied empathy. Ethnography is fundamentally about empathy,
as understanding the actions, values and cultural habits of the other is at its core:
“ethnographic researchers are trying to discover what is going on in a sociocul-
tural scene and to understand how the people involved understand what they
are doing” (Lee & Zaharlick 2013: 51). It is also fundamentally embodied, as it
requires the researchers to enter the field to be studied and to position themselves
with respect to others inhabiting that field. Assignments designed to open the stu-
dents’ “ethnographic eye” in everyday contexts also enhance their reflexive skills.
Underlining the difference between emic and etic approaches in classroom dis-
cussions allows the students to develop their abilities in empathetic e­ ngagement
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

and also to reflect on the difference between adopting the other’s perspective and
keeping their own.
Although the classroom context limits the extent of fieldwork to microengage-
ment, many students have found the assignment highly motivating, and reports of
fieldwork tend to spark lively debates and discussions in class. Over the years, my
students have been asked, for example, to spend a week observing what kinds of
translation spaces they inhabit in their own life and to identify and report on a
potential topic of research. In other words, they have been asked to observe and
reflect critically on their own thematic universe (Freire 2005: 106). Students have
identified a number of interesting grassroots projects related to their life outside
the university, such as ad-hoc interpreting and cultural mediation to immigrant
pupils in the classroom; child language brokering in a sports club, and translating
and interpreting practices in multilingual workplaces and hobbies. These themes
have then been discussed in class, in a collective attempt at making a move from
practice to praxis. The task not only supports an awakening to ­various contempo-
rary social issues from a public translation studies perspective, but it also brings
the students’ extensive pool of experiences into the classroom and allows them to
relate their academic knowledge to their personal lives (Koskinen 2012b). Per-
sonal involvement in the observed events makes it easier to approach them with
empathy and understanding, as family ties, affinity and closeness breed affective
empathy (Smith 2006). Embedding the assignment in the students’ own lives and
personal experiences, and thus giving it an additional embodied and affective ele-
ment, also creates possibilities for embodied learning.
Affective empathy means sharing the experiences and feelings of others so
that we begin to resonate the same feelings. In simulated empathy, the focus is
in imagining how it might be to be the other; affective empathy more directly
tunes us in to the feelings of the other. Aaltola explains that in affective empathy
we sway with the feelings of the other like reeds sway with the water (2018: 64;
cf. Chapter 3). This skill to be swayed is crucial for ethical behaviour (ibid.: 94),
as it evokes in us a felt need to act to alleviate suffering. Affective empathy is
for many the prototypical kind of empathy. It can indeed be argued that it is a
core element of empathy, as the complete lack of affective empathy leads to per-
sonality disorders such as psychopathology and narcissism. On the other hand,
excessive affective empathy can also be a burden, and a source of misjudge-
ment. This is probably one reason for the emphasis on professional detach-
ment in interpreting (see Chapter 5). Professional detachment, however, does
not need to mean shutting down empathy entirely. Rather, affective empathy
needs to be seasoned with cognitive empathy, that is, the ability to recognize
and decode the affects of others, to read and to manipulate situations (ibid.: 49;
see also Cuff et al. 2014: 7).
 Translation and Affect

Cognitive empathy by-passes the affective layer entirely, valuing rational

­observation and critical interpretation of the affect-states and circumstances of the
participants and then making informed judgements on the best course of action. It
therefore allows us to clear our vision and see through attempts at manipulation.
But it can also lead to cold calculation and manipulative behaviour. For success in
social life, and in translation, cognitive and affective empathy therefore need to be
balanced. Excessive amounts of either can get us into difficulty, as will a complete
lack of either one. Modulation of affects can be seen as a core translatorial task (see
Chapter 3). While one can, undoubtedly, manage the affects of other participants
by applying purely cognitive empathy and cleverly manipulating others’ emotional
states, it seems entirely unsatisfactory to claim that this would be enough for a
successful career. Most people have an innate capacity for affective empathy, and a
professional ideal that is based on suppressing it entirely would be likely to lead to
unhealthy consequences. On the other hand, excessive and poorly managed affec-
tive empathy would not bode well for professional well-being either:

CE [cognitive empathy] is used to negotiate one’s way in the complex social world
of humans. But if substantial EE [emotional/affective empathy] always occurred
with CE the effect (and affect) could be overwhelming. It might distract us from
our behavioral goals or motivate altruism that reduces inclusive fitness. Sharing
the negative emotions of others may be inherently costly and sharing positive
emotions that are not appropriate to one’s situation could sometimes be highly
distracting. Social expertise in a world of emotional beings requires the ability to
understand the minds of others and predict their overt behavior without neces-
sarily sharing their emotions. (Smith 2006: 6)

Cognitive empathy is clearly a professional skill intercultural mediators and others

engaged in affective labour need to fine-tune to be able to perform competently
and in an informed manner in different situations. But what they also need to learn
is how to take stock of their own affective responses to these same situations. They
need to gain practice in being swayed by the situational affects, and by their own
affective empathy, and in resisting excessive swaying by also resorting to cognitive
empathy. In the classroom, opportunities for practising this are abundant. Below, I
describe two variations of an assignment I have used several times. The two exer-
cises both aim to create “an emotionally competent trigger, a situation either real
or imagined that has the power to induce an emotion” (Immordino-Yang & Dam-
asio 2007: 7). This emotion – or emotions since they can be many and they also
often evolve and change during the translation process – is then subjected to self-
reflexive observation from different perspectives: memories, bodily reactions, how
and whether the affects affected the translation, and how and whether the result-
ing translation solutions can be justified, and so on. These will assist the students
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

to become more reflexive about their own positioning, and the necessary partiality
of their own viewpoint just as much as those of the author, commissioner or the
reader, allowing them to practice rational assessment of the situation, postponing
the judgement of views conflicting with their own, and empathic listening skills.
The first variation concerns a translation task where two texts on the same
topic are assigned to be translated at the same time by each student. The idea is to
select the texts so that they represent radically opposing viewpoints, forcing the
students to also position themselves in the matter at hand. I encourage teachers
to choose controversial topics: the opposing sides of an acute geopolitical crisis,
abortion rights, transgender issues, alt-right versus ultra-liberal takes on immi-
gration and so on. It is of paramount importance that neither one of the texts is
a caricature, and both are to be treated with dignity. While these kinds of choices
will expose the classroom to potential conflicts that may be unpleasant for the
teacher to manage, they also give room for reflexivity and enable learning to take
place. The goal is to give students the experience of being forced to participate via
translation to communicating a view one absolutely does not subscribe to, and to
contrast that to the other one that is easier to agree with. It also offers an oppor-
tunity to guide the students into listening to their affective and bodily responses
in both situations. It is fairly easy to feel empathy towards someone who shares
your views; it is a much harder task to try to evoke empathy towards someone
whose views you oppose. Trying actively to do so – and potentially failing to do
so – will allow the students to explore the limits of their professional detachment,
preparing them for drawing the lines of their own ethics at work. In other words,
they will be given opportunities to enhance their affective and bodily capital (see
Chapter 5) and to increase their professional resilience. In classroom discussion,
a successful choice of texts will offer an added benefit of listening to the rationales
of other students, both in terms of how they have chosen their side among the two
texts and in drawing the professional line.
The above exercise is teacher-lead, as the text selection and set-up are laid
out for the students, who all encounter the same task, regardless of their personal
views and cultural backgrounds. In the course context, this may potentially lead to
fruitfully divergent viewpoints, but may also result in challenging situations, as the
teacher does not necessarily have full knowledge of the personal traumas in the
classroom and may end up selecting a text that is too laden for some and causes
pain and hence prevents learning. It is also not optimal if everybody holds the
same view on the topic and the discussion ends up condemning the other view-
point. An even more effective variation can be achieved by asking each student
to select a topic they feel strongly about and a source text that represents a stance
diagonally opposite to their own (in the past, my students have, for example, cho-
sen to translate an article aimed at gun aficionados and a pro-euthanasia text).
 Translation and Affect

This translation task allows the student to fully immerse in the dilemma of empa-
thizing with your client and the skopos of the translation while at the same time
not losing your own grounding in the process.
The two exercises described above – translating two texts with radically oppos-
ing views, and translating a text you strongly dislike – have both been designed to
push students out of their emotional comfort zone, to encounter and understand
views opposing their own (cognitive empathy); to try to resonate the feeling and
experiences of this other person (affective empathy); to experience and explore
their own affects and potential emotional discomfort (embodied empathy) and,
ultimately, to contemplate on translation ethics and the extent to which personal
beliefs and opinions should and can be kept from interfering in translation work
(reflexive empathy). In either variation, the feedback session to this assignment
also needs to include a discussion of bodily aspects, as some students may have
experienced unexpected and unpleasant sensations, and these need to be pro-
cessed so that students can become attuned to what kinds of bodily signals they
may listen to in order to identify their personal zones of excessive discomfort and
how they can unwind from challenging professional tasks. I also strongly recom-
mend the use of an accompanying reflective commentary, where the students are
guided to reflect on the task from the viewpoints of cognitive and affective empa-
thy as well as on their own affective and embodied experiences during the assign-
ment. These personal and collective metadiscussions open the assignment to the
sphere of reflexive empathy, that is, to a dialogic movement between the actual
case at hand and the various types of empathy involved and a metalevel analysis
of one’s own affective responses and the socio-cultural mechanisms that condition
which interpretations are being foregrounded and which affective responses tend
to be positively or negatively sanctioned (Aaltola 2018: 96–97).
In this section, the ability to work with different types of empathy has been
portrayed as a necessary form of social capital for a competent professional
translator. Being able to understand the affective states of others and to see the
world from their viewpoint is a prerequisite for successful affective labour. I have
also emphasized that an essential corollary to this is the need to also be able to
recognize and reflect one’s own affective states and the viewpoints one holds.
I have no doubt that this is indeed the case. It has been widely acknowledged
that empathy plays an important role in human behaviour, and translating as an
intercultural mediation activity is definitely not an exception. Skills in empathy
are, at least to some extent, teachable and learnable, and their role will only
increase in the future.
In the preceding chapters, the risk of deskilling has been raised in the con-
texts of prescriptive codes of conduct (Chapter 5) and increasingly automated
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

machine translation (Chapter 7). This chapter is designed to emphasize coun-

teractions to this tendency. A deskilled but extremely empathic translator is at
great risk to become a burned-out translator, if the routes from empathy to task
completion are blocked. To counterbalance the risk of excessive affective empa-
thy, I also want to emphasize empowerment. To succeed in their task, translators
need to tune in to two directions, but to complete the translation they also need
to make decisions even when this means forcing a closure on an aspect that is
legitimately open, contradictory or ambivalent, and then be willing and able to
stand by these decisions.

8.3 Empowerment

In critical pedagogy, students’ empowerment is of crucial importance, and one

can argue that the examples of course work given in Section 8.2 also support
students’ ability to find and exercise their own critical voice. In this section I
want to turn to another target group of training: professionals willing to enhance
their ­professional affective skills and take control of their emotion manage-
ment. In translation studies literature, research reports on the kinds of training
offered for those already in the professional world are still rare, but in today’s
world, continued (life-long) learning is crucial for managing one’s career and
for keeping up in the rapidly changing environment, and empowerment and
self-reflection are equally relevant for professionals as they are for students. In
the case of affects, in particular, more senior participants may be in a better
position to benefit from reflective and awareness-raising sessions than young
students. A positive correlation has been found between age and emotion per-
ception, and the ability to anticipate and respond to emotions is also assumed
to improve over time (Hubscher-Davidson 2018: 90). This temporal improve-
ment through maturation clearly signals that we are not confined to whatever
abilities we were born with, and that makes it also more likely that explicit train-
ing may facilitate this improvement. This is also supported by the findings of
Hubscher-Davidson (ibid.: 131–132) that indicate the benefits of education to
emotion regulation, and she indeed suggests that it could be actively taught by
certain activities while, she argues, the current translator training appears not
to contribute to this area of development (ibid.: 199–200). The correlation with
age also makes it only logical to not limit affect-oriented training exclusively to
students; more mature and more experienced participants may be more inclined
to engage in addressing this area of their inner selves, they will be more familiar
with the socio-cultural norms and expectations and the affects involved, and
 Translation and Affect

they may also be better able to co-construct a beneficial learning environment

that w­ elcomes open reflexion.
For several years now, some of my translator friends have been following my
efforts at untangling the relationship between affect and translation with great
interest, and they have also given me a lot of support during the writing of this
book. For me, an academic interest in affects and embodiment has leaked into
my private life in the form of heightened interest in paying active attention to my
emotion states and their embodied manifestations as well as pushing my bound-
aries in terms of engaging in activities that challenge my feelings of complacency
and risk-free performance. Similarly, it has been evident among my friends that
arousing the awareness of the affective in professional translators and interpreters
also awakens their affective tendrils in terms of their own affective conditioning in
different professional situations as well as that of others. It therefore seemed only
logical that the proposal to organize a workshop on affects specifically for profes-
sionals, where they could engage in collective discussion and reflection on the
positive and negative affective elements of their work, was first made by a profes-
sional translator, Tiina Kinnunen.
In the XVII Symposium on Translation and Interpreting Studies at T ­ ampere
University (12 April 2019) we organized a workshop on affective labour for
­professional translators and interpreters. In addition to Kinnunen, the organiz-
ing team consisted of a translator-cum-researcher (Minna Hjort), a lecturer and
researcher interested in translators’ status and job satisfaction (Minna Ruokonen)
and myself. A combination of a short introductory lecture on affect followed by
small-group discussions, the workshop was designed to provide professionals with
opportunities to reflect on their own affective wiring at work: what kinds of issues
bug them and why, how one can use affects and emotions constructively, and what
kinds of emotion management strategies might be useful and when. The aim was
to empower participants to acknowledge the positive dynamic of affects and to
resist their negative elements, hopefully supporting them at becoming more con-
tent and balanced in the professional life and less prone to get agitated or upset
when confronted with adverse affects either within themselves or in others.
Emotions and affects are often seen as a soft and positive topic, and in the
workplace context the focus is typically on either managing and regulating emo-
tions or on finding the keys to happiness or job satisfaction. Although the aims of
our workshop can be related to job satisfaction, and the end goal was indeed to
increase professional translators’ wellbeing at work, we took a somewhat darker
approach, and rather than encouraging participants to maximize their positive
affects at work, we emphasized the necessity to also acknowledge and work with
negative affects. Feelings such as anxiety, shame, anger or envy can be productively
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

harnessed for exposing and exploring the more uncomfortable issues that we have
suppressed from our consciousness.
To provide a conceptual tool for dealing with negative affects, the concept of
shadow work borrowed from the psychology of C. E. Jung was briefly introduced
at the beginning of the workshop. In Jung’s thinking the human psyche contains
both the ego, that is, the conscious, accepted self that we hold, and the shadow, that
is, those aspects and qualities of ourselves we are unwilling to encounter, and that
we therefore deny and suppress to the unconscious.

The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about
himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly – for
instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.
 (Jung 1991: 285)

The shadow contains our innermost flaws, weaknesses, fears, shames and deni-
als. As the elements placed in the shadow keep thrusting themselves on us, they
delimit our possibilities and sabotage our life (Jung 1991: 123). The more we sup-
press the shadow, the more it possesses us and the heavier our burden becomes.
Shadow work, an active probing of the dark and hidden sides of our inner self,
allows us to tackle these aspects and bring them to light, reducing their grip on
us. In doing so, negative affects function as a signal of the existence of a shadow,
asking us to pause to reflect on what triggers them. This creates a link between
shadow work and affective labour, as becoming better attuned to one’s affective
impulses is a core element of shadow work. It is not necessarily that we would not
perceive the impulses, but we may not wish to admit them fully and they therefore
easily get misconstrued, creating rippling effects of affects:

Psychoanalysis allows us to show how emotions such as hate involve a process

of movement or association, whereby feelings take us across different levels of sig-
nification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. That is what I call the
‘rippling’ effect of emotions; they move sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations
between signs, figures and objects) as well as forwards and backwards (repression
always leaves a trace in the present – hence ‘what sticks’ is bound up with the
absent presence of historicity). (Ahmed 2014: 44–45; italics in the original)

Jung lists myths and stories among key sources of information about collective
archetypes, such as the shadow. We could also talk about sticky affects. Some
elements of translators’ professional “mythology” are affectively sticky and
catchy in the sense that they tend to trigger predictable and accepted affective
responses. Many of them seem to be linked to our socio-cultural programming
related to the collective unconscious and the shadows involved. For example, the
 Translation and Affect

­ iblical myth of Babel, arguably the best-known myth of translation, can be read
b
as bringing to light the burden and annoyance of translation, an aspect effec-
tively downplayed and hidden by the repeated metaphors of bridge-building
among the profession.
Archetypes and sticky affects remind us that an important aspect of the
shadow is that it is not only individual but also collective. In translation studies,
translators’ habitus has received a lot of attention. Although studies of habitus may
have foregrounded personal trajectories and individual life stories, habitus, too, is
fundamentally collective in that it is built and shaped in constant dialogue with
the surrounding socio-cultural environment. Putting these together, it could be
argued that a translator’s ego is the accepted and socially consecrated part of the
“professional translator” habitus, whereas the collective professional shadow con-
tains those sides of the profession that are less acceptable, or less easy to deal with
where they are allowed to enter the collective consciousness.
The workshop proved so popular that it needed to be moved to a bigger lec-
ture hall to fit everyone in. Some 30 participants were divided into small groups to
discuss what irritates, upsets and annoys them at work, and what kinds of shadows
can be jointly identified as operating in the background. Discussion was lively.
One shadow in particular was repeatedly referred to: the fear of not being appre-
ciated (cf. Chapter 4). This collective professional low self-esteem was identified
as the hidden other of the professional ego of translatorial expertise, and it was
collectively found to feed into strong negative affects in responding to a client’s
complaints and correcting mistakes, in being belittled by the client, in comparing
oneself to other translators with a different educational background and so on.
The same shadow was also seen to get activated in the rush of rage by overhearing
a colleague downplaying their professional status and value (for example, calling
themselves “only a humanist”).
The goal was to empower the participants, and a lot of emphasis was therefore
put on discussing coping strategies and ways forward. Participants came up with
numerous solutions, for example, wearing a professional mental “uniform” (cf.
Chapter 5) rather than burning your own skin, exiting (and picking one’s battles),
peer support from colleagues, taking a step back and counting to ten, observing
one’s affective stance rather than being consumed by it, and setting time limits
to how long you allow yourself to wallow in a negative issue. Importantly, the
usefulness of identifying and understanding the affects of others and moving the
focus away from one’s own insecurities – that is, empathy – was deemed useful: a
“difficult” client may well be dealing with problems or limitations the translator is
unaware of and is doing the best they can in a difficult situation.
The Jungian concept of shadow is complex, archetypal and even mystic, and
he provides few clear-cut definitions. In a two-hour workshop one can also only
 Chapter 8. Affect and pedagogy 

introduce the concept superficially. On the other hand, according to Jung’s own
experience, in his framework of archetypes, the shadow is the concept people
usually find easy to relate to and it is the first to come up in the analysis of the
unconscious (Jung 1991: 272). Indeed, even in a superficial form the concept
of shadow functions as a heuristic tool that supports us in confronting difficult,
angering and embarrassing affects constructively and reflexively, avoiding the risk
of merely resorting to collective ranting that would reinforce rather than alleviate
the power of the shadow over us. Reflexivity is also the key to empowerment: the
more in contact we are with our authentic self, the more balanced our professional
demeanour can be. Instead of getting swept away with negative affects when they
arise, it is possible to take a moment to observe them, identify their origin and let
them be. Identifying and embracing one’s shadow requires inward observation,
and it may be an extremely uncomfortable process of self-reflexion. It therefore
also calls for compassion towards oneself.
Empowerment is not simply about being bold, daring and assertive. It is about
having one’s two feet firmly on the ground: being in touch with one’s emotions and
values, having a firm moral grounding, being able to neutrally assess the situation
and the best course of action and then firmly defending that choice even in the
face of criticism – and also shifting one’s position if new and compelling evidence
is brought into play. Reflexive work on our affects will help us gain and maintain
this position, and the concept of shadow and shadow work can be used to support
that reflexion.
***
This chapter has put forward a particular understanding of translator education,
one with an idealist bend and overtly resistant to the current tendencies of instru-
mentalist approaches that emphasize servile employability. This, I believe, is the
only route for teachers and students – and ultimately for the translation industry
as well – to survive the existing trend of neoliberal policy combined with digitali-
zation, automation and precarization of translators’ and interpreters’ work. Empa-
thy-oriented approaches to translation are interpersonal by nature, and closely
related to ethics and moral behaviour. The issues of empowerment are more indi-
vidual, but they are outward-oriented in that they focus on bringing forth action
in the social world. Approaching empowerment from the perspective of shadow
work allows us to balance both the personal and the social. In the training context,
it is also necessary to deal with how affects affect. This interpersonal and social
orientation is in keeping with the general focus of this book: it is more about how
particular affects operate socially and what affects can do in the world than about
the cognitive or neurophysiological functions that might explain why translating
feels as it does. The component that brings everything together is reflexivity, that
 Translation and Affect

is, a personal skill. Introducing affects, and in particular their felt, bodily signals,
in the curriculum will help young professionals to learn to navigate the spaces
of translation they encounter, listening to their guts and hearts and using their
agency to move things in a direction where both the bodies and minds of all par-
ticipants can thrive.
 chapter 9

Conclusions
Affecting and being affected

The preceding chapters have charted the landscape of translatoriality from the
perspective of affect. Regardless of how affect is defined – as a nonconscious vis-
ceral reaction or a social force or something in between – it is part of our human
condition: our systems of observing and responding to our surroundings are not
only rational but also affective, and our affective responses allow us to interpret,
assess and judge the developments we witness and take part in. Translating and
interpreting as human activities are no exception. On the contrary. This book is
an extended argument that to a significant degree they consist of affective labour.
The combination of the rational and the affective is one root cause for unde-
cidability in translation, and in life. Many of the shifts, or swaying and sliding, in
translation solutions can be attributed to either translators’ conscious or uncon-
scious reactions to their affective responses or to an attempt at accommodating for
known or assumed affects in reception. This kind of swaying is a constant feature
of translations, and an affectively non-swayed translation strategy may also lead
to swayed reception due to the change of cultural and social context and perhaps
also a change of skopos. The culturally widespread desire for sameness in transla-
tion and the swaying inherent in the activity of translating and interpreting feed
a sticky fear of mistranslation. This foregrounds trust as an affective element for
translators and interpreters to cultivate in and around performing their work.
Affects are in many ways bodily grounded. We can only be affected by what
our sensory systems register, and this is constrained by both our bodily capacities
and our material location. Virtual and digital spaces are a highly relevant object of
study in the contemporary translatorial scene, but it is also important to remem-
ber that regardless of the virtual systems of organizing work and the technological
solutions therein, human translators can only operate in one physical place at a
time, and their performance is constrained by the capacities of their body. Issues
such as ethnicity, age and gender are innate and embodied qualities we need to
live by. Cognitive constraints such as memory, fatigue or ennui are only marginally
adaptable, as possibilities for working around our cognitive processing capacity
and biological needs are limited. In comparison, emotions and affects are more
 Translation and Affect

malleable: although we often cannot control what we feel, we can control how we
approach it, and we can learn to regulate emotions and to manage how much we
sway by them.
Providing elements that improve self-awareness, critical thinking and reflex-
ivity in translator training – and also beyond that in continued professional edu-
cation – increases the professional skills of future translators, improving their
chances of job satisfaction, persistently high motivation levels and happiness at
work. But there is more to affect than personal psychological gains. Affects cir-
culate in societies and they stick, creating affective practices and affective econo-
mies, and their effects also reach beyond the sphere of the personal. The social
and collective side of affects brings to the fore the transformative power of affect:
affects are powerful societal forces and living wisely with affects can lead to radi-
cally changed structures of feeling and transformed practices.
Affects are linked to embeddedness and embodiment, grounding us in our
physical surroundings. Our place-bound existence also entails positionality. We
occupy particular positions, and we are able to approach experiences in life from
the perspectives these positions allow us to take. This is a crucial question for medi-
ation professions such as translating and interpreting, as they are fundamentally
built on the necessity to understand the viewpoints of others. The requirement of
empathic and affectionate affinity to the source text author often expected of trans-
lators is diagonally opposite to the requirement of impersonal neutrality directed
at public service interpreters. This creates tensions towards empathy, which is to be
seen as both a necessary and unwanted professional quality. ­Ambivalence is also
at the heart of translators’ felt experiences of translating, where the misery and
splendour of this activity alternate and are both equally true descriptions of what
the task is like.
In this book I have revisited a number of my own previous scholarly works,
both research I have carried on my own and that I have conducted with a num-
ber of colleagues. Issues related to affect had been bubbling under in my work
for quite some time, and taking affect as the focus of attention has allowed me to
highlight the topic systematically across a varied set of fields, questions and data.
Doing that, I have felt I am teasing out and making visible aspects already implic-
itly and intuitively known to the translation studies community but also that I
am reaching towards “envisionings beyond the already known” (Gibbs 2010: 203)
and contributing to the “forging of a new body” (Clough 2010: 207). Regardless
of how my attempt at creating foundational work on affect in translation studies
for others to build on is received, I remain confident that the topic merits further
inquiry. Although I have aimed for clarity, the nature of this object of study and
the multifarious bodies of prior research in various disciplines have dictated that
during this exploration I have also most probably participated in complexifying
 Chapter 9. Conclusions 

the concept of affect. According to Brian Massumi (2015: x–xi) this is how it has to
be, in order to be adequate to the complexity of life itself:
Such fellow-travelling concepts as “differential affective attunement”, “collective
individuation”, “micro-politics”, “thinking-feeling”, “bare activity”, “ontopower”
and “immanent critique” relay the base definition of affect.… Once they intro-
duce themselves, they wend their way through subsequent interviews, taking on
greater conceptual consistency, complexifying the concept of affect as they go.
This is what a process-oriented exploration does: complexify its conceptual web
as it advances. It tries not to reduce. It tries not to encapsulate. It does not end in
an overview. Rather, it tries to become more and more adequate to the complex-
ity of life.

So, what can we do with affect? In the preceding chapters I have used affect as
a bridge concept. Aiming at a consolidation of various research agendas, I have
applied an affective lens to six areas of study within the field of translating and
interpreting, trying to tease out the effects of affect for each. I hope this book
succeeds in being an invitation for a continued fascination with the complexity
of translatorial life and of the ordinary and sticky affects related to translating
and interpreting. The preceding chapters do not make any claim of a comprehen-
sive treatment of affect. They are snapshots of a rich area of human action and
­interaction. Affect is not a research paradigm or a disciplinary turn. It is a dimen-
sion of human life. An omnipresent element in everything we engage in, including
translating and interpreting. Lived experience.
Affects are also omnipresent in research. In spite of the quest for objectivity
and repeatability, researchers cannot escape their humanity. Researchers of affect
will find themselves in a double bind: researching affects will, at least in my experi-
ence, intensify the felt presence of affects in other spheres of life as well, and affec-
tively intense personal experiences will have a way of protruding into academic
texts. In the spirit of also giving visibility to the researcher’s affects, I have not
excluded the more personal anecdotes when they have seemed illuminating for
the case at hand or relevant for the reader to assess my perspective to the topic. I
have been writing this book during a time when I have also experienced affective
turmoil in my own life. During the past couple of years, I have ticked nearly all
the boxes of the top ten stressors in life, turning my life upside down in a process
of loss and mourning but also of immense joy, recovery and renewal. All this has
also been bodily felt in numerous ways. Amidst all this, the idea of writing an
academic monograph is not intuitively the most logical thing to do. I do think the
urgency with which it pushed itself into my top priorities and persisted through
the writing process is not unconnected with the more personal ways in which the
affective insisted on me paying constant attention to it. The combination of the
­theoretical-analytic and the felt-personal has been rewarding on both sides. I wish
 Translation and Affect

to re-quote the opening citation on the actual science and the other, affective side
of science. The affects involved have indeed at times felt “so powerful that they
sometimes dominate the whole life of the scholar”.
Along side of this actual, realized science, there is another, concrete and living,
which is in part ignorant of itself, and yet speaks itself; besides acquired results,
there are hopes, habits, instincts, needs, presentiments so obscure that they can-
not be expressed in words, yet so powerful that they sometimes dominate the
whole life of the scholar. (Durkheim 1993: 362)

According to Spinoza, every interaction changes us; we are affected by it. I was
affected by the writing of this book. I can only hope reading it affected you.
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 Index

A agency, dance of 143, creativity 10, 135, 150, 153, 155,

accent 38, 111, 114 147–148, 153 157–158
acceptability 9, 45, 48, 61, 62, alien I 103 critical pedagogy 160, 165–166,
137 alienation 29, 38, 58, 63–66, 173
accuracy 10, 48, 59, 65, 106, 68, 112 crying 71–72, 106, 126
108, 113, 135, 137, 149 anger 14, 19, 39, 90, 106, 174
aesthetics 25–26, 46, 63, 66, 81, anxiety xii, 9–10, 38, 40, 41, 81, D
84, 132, 134, 155 85–86, 108, 151, 174 decision-making xi, 4–5, 7,
affect alien 68 anxiety of influence 66, 79 14, 18, 25, 46–48, 55, 124,
affect regulation (see also appraisal 8, 13, 14, 33, 153, 177
emotion regulation) 45, 48–54, 53, 57, 59, 66, desire to translate 13, 65, 86,
56, 61 78, 87, 90 90–92, 150
affect, management of 29, 32, appraisal theory 48–50, 53 deskilling 114, 155, 172–173
114, 162, 170, 173 artificial intelligence (AI) 3–4, diary xii, 51, 73–86
affect, narrated 6, 17, 73–75, 152–154 distance (see also affinity) 30,
92–93, 122 audience 63, 67, 98, 100, 57, 62, 64, 99, 100, 103,
affect, primary 6, 14, 45 133–134, 163 110–113, 117, 133, 138, 146,
affect, sticky xi, 2, 4–5, 24, 33, autobiography 73–74, 88, 92 150
34–38, 39, 40, 42, 65, 68, doing being 97–102
96–97, 101, 162, 175–176, B
179–181 belonging 27, 48, 120–124, 140 E
affective commitment 91–92 bodily, see embodiment embeddedness 8, 16, 17, 22, 32,
affective computing 151–152 break-up letter (see love letter) 61, 72, 118, 120, 122, 168,
affective economy 2, 5, 30, 39, 169, 180
41–42, 97, 101, 180 C embodiment xii, 5, 6, 8, 13, 14,
affective labour 2, 29–33, capital, affective 41, 97, 99, 15, 17, 21, 22, 23, 30, 38, 41,
37–39, 42, 51, 62, 69, 97, 100 , 104, 108, 110, 112, 48, 65, 77, 98, 99, 100, 103,
99, 103, 105, 109, 111–114, 114, 171 105, 126, 138, 158, 166, 168,
150, 157, 167, 170, 172, capital, bodily 23, 97, 99, 100, 174, 180
174–175, 179 104, 110, 112, 114, 171 emotion regulation 9, 40–41,
affective practice 2, 18, 20, 46, capital, social 172 55, 56, 71, 173
92–93, 180 carnivalism 135–140 emotion, management of (see
affective response 4, 5, 6, 30, censorship 7, 47, 56, 68 affect, management of)
34, 55 codes of conduct 96, 100–102, emotional intelligence 9–10,
affective stance 5, 7, 17, 33, 77, 106–109, 114–115, 155, 172 99, 152
85, 88, 96, 103, 121, 129, compassion 110, 116, 167, 177 emotional labour 2, 29–31,
138, 150, 160–161, 176 competence 32, 73, 81, 95, 103, 40, 109 (see also affective
affective valence 4, 33, 108, 110–111, 155, 158–160, labour)
46–49, 55, 58–59, 61–63, 167 emotional man 4
67, 77 confidence 8, 39–40, 77–82, 85, empathy 8, 41, 106–110, 116,
affinity 30, 37, 48, 51, 53, 57, 59, 86, 103 157–160, 166–173, 176, 180
62–66, 98, 108, 111–112, 115, consilience 2–3, 32 empathy, affective 167,
117, 168–169, 180 continuance commitment 169–170, 172, 173
affordance 13, 51, 123 91–92 empathy, cognitive 167,
agency 23, 31, 36, 39–40, 124, continued education 173–177 169–170, 172
129, 178 coping strategies 40, 146, 176 empathy, cultural 108
 Translation and Affect

empathy, embodied 167, I normative commitment 91

168, 172 identity 34, 36, 51, 75–76, norms ix, x, 7, 8, 9 35, 48,
empathy, projective 167, 168 88–90, 98, 99, 120, 59, 63, 95, 97–98, 99,
empathy, reflexive 167, 172 123–124, 148, 150 106–108, 136, 137, 138,
empathy, simulating 167, impartiality (see also 173
168, 169, 172 neutrality) 95, 100–106, nostalgia 19, 66, 67
empowerment 36, 38, 106, 108
129–130, 151, 157–160, impostor syndrome xii, 78, O
173–178 85, 91–92 ostranenie 63
equivalence 60, 135–138, 140, intercultural competence 42,
158 73, 108, 158–159, 167, 170 P
ergonomics 8, 41, 122, 143 intercultural space 117–118 passion 12–13, 32, 34, 36, 133
ethics x, xi, 23, 25, 34, 37, 66, interview 40, 121–129 parody 121, 135–137, 139–140
71, 101–102, 105, 106, 155, pastoral 87–88
157–159, 165, 167, 169, J performance 2, 30–32, 33, 37,
171–172, 177 job satisfaction 6, 9, 86, 91, 39, 42, 61, 71, 95–103, 107,
ethnicity 31, 68, 97, 110, 128, 140, 174, 180 109, 111, 112, 114–116, 121,
111–114, 179 joy 14, 19, 89, 138, 181 124, 130, 132–134, 146, 150,
ethnography (see also 174, 179
fieldwork) 39, 168 K performative arts 130–134
everyday (see also lived keying 60–61 performativity 102, 131
experience) 11, 30, 46, pleasure 1, 13–14, 87–88, 90,
60–61, 62, 68, 71, 76, 98 L 91, 123, 145
laughter 106, 126, 136, 138–139, posthumanism 41, 143, 148
F 141, 150 praxis 159, 165, 169
face 16, 29–30, 38, 99, 103–106, lived experience ix, x, 6, 14, presentism 65
110, 122, 135 72, 93, 162, 168, 169, 181 public translation studies 164–
facework 60, 104–105 love 5, 34–39, 41, 42, 54, 72, 98, 166, 169
familiarity 9, 36, 62, 63, 66, 68, 128, 135, 139, 144–149, 152
101–102, 112, 114 love letter and break-up R
fear 14, 19, 36, 38, 68, 87, letter 144–149 reception 25, 26, 33, 45, 47–48,
95, 101, 138, 149, 151, loyalty 5, 39, 40, 42, 98, 101, 53–54, 57–61, 62–68, 85,
176, 179 127, 162 134, 137, 179
fear of betrayal 32, 35, 38, recognition 37, 74, 84, 86, 89,
95–96 M 121, 128, 129, 140
feeling rules 8–9 machine translation (see reflexivity 36, 42–43, 113–116,
fidelity 33, 34, 35, 37, 139 technology, machine 129, 140, 157, 159–166,
fieldwork (see also translation) 170–171, 173, 177, 180
ethnography) 130–134, mask 37–38, 103–105, 110 resilience 171
159, 168–169 memory 14, 18, 26, 66, 67, 73, risk 8, 68, 85, 96, 100, 101,
flow 71, 84, 86, 93, 147 170, 179 106, 110–112, 113, 115, 132,
focus group 122, 125–126, 129 microexpressions 105 153, 174
framing 19, 56, 59, 60–61, 110 modulation 5, 7, 31–33, 45,
friendship 34–35, 53, 72 56–62, 107, 151, 170 S
motivation 6, 40, 86, 90, 92, sadness 105–106
G 93, 127, 128, 144, 160, 162, satisfaction, see also job
gender 15, 31, 34, 53–54, 85, 166, 169, 180 satisfaction 74, 77–79,
97–98, 113–114, 171, 179 86–87, 89, 90, 91, 93
N self-confidence, see confidence
H network 38–42, 122–127, sentiment analysis 144, 149,
habitus 7, 9, 38, 72, 89–90, 97, 129–130 151–152
111, 126, 144, 176 neutrality (see also shadow 38, 130, 175–177
happiness 19, 87–88, 90, 127, impartiality) 29, 33, 35, shadow work 35, 175–177
174, 180 37, 38, 95–98, 113, 115–116, shame 9, 14, 38, 68, 76, 77,
humour 47, 121, 136, 150 117, 180 83–85, 127, 174–175
 Index 

social media 3, 50–51, 54, 56, technology 3–4, 9, 22, 41, trauma 71, 103, 129, 157–178,
92, 149–152 49, 51, 121, 132, 143–144, 180
social media, blogs 49–54, 146–156, 158, 164, 179 trust 38, 40, 77, 96, 99, 101–102,
55 technology acceptance 144, 106, 121, 123, 132, 141, 179
social media, Facebook 72, 147 trustworthiness 29, 32, 41, 98,
149 technology, interpreting 100, 112, 114, 141
social media, memes 134– technology 99, 113, 121, 152
140 technology, machine U
social media, Twitter 149– translation xi, 50, 55, 148, usability 26, 143–144, 146–147,
151 149–156, 158 149, 151
somatics 7–8, 48, 56, 66 technology, translation user experience 26, 62, 146
spatiality 23, 64, 76, 99–100, technology 3–4, 41, 50,
113, 117–118, 122–123, 130, 136, 143–148, 154, 161, 165 V
168, 179 translation industry 26, 39, valence (see also affective
stress 40, 99, 114, 146, 162 41, 121–123, 125, 127–129, valence) 4, 46–47
stress, ethical stress 40, 143–144, 146, 148, 152, valence, microvalence 46–
103, 110 154–155, 158, 161, 165, 177 47
stress, technostress 146 translation space 117–118, 122, voice 29–30, 37–38, 52, 54, 78,
structures of feeling 11, 73, 91, 129, 131, 134 102–106, 114, 127–128, 133,
93, 95, 180 translation zone 118 135, 152, 155, 162, 173
sway 56–57, 61, 134, 140, 169, translator education 4, 148,
170, 179–180 157–178, 180 W
translatorial space (see also we-attitude 53
T translation space) 118, 134 wellbeing 40, 146, 148, 162, 170
taboo 7, 47, 56, 68 transposition 60 work engagement 86–91
In an age of AI and automated translation, the affective remains a
decisively human condition. Translation and Affect is a collection of essays
that investigate the role of affects and emotions across the spectrum
of translatorial activities and areas, from public service interpreting to
multilingual poetry recitals, from translator training to translation technology.
In an effort at creating a consilient approach that bridges different research
traditions in Translation Studies, Koskinen uses affective labour and affects
and their stickiness as a lens to understand how it feels to translate and
how translations feel. Written in a personal and engaging style, the book
encourages readers interested in translation issues to look at translation as
an affective practice and to explore and reflect their own ways of living with
translation.

isbn 978 90 272 0703 6

John Benjamins Publishing Company