Translation in critical times: a narrative approach

Abstract

This paper explores how competing narratives dispute the public sphere by means of acts of translation, inscribing the conflict resulting both from intercultural gaps among participants, and from the political economy of ethnical-racial, gender and sexual violence in capitalist societies. Taken as the material and symbolic effect of metadiscursive regimes that structure social narratives, violence is focused upon as the result of translatorial processes that present themselves as the mirror of reality, which requires problematization as well as the visibilization of the narratives in dispute. The corpus is made of intra and interlingual translations carried out by volunteer collectives opposing Brazilian media mainstream outlets throughout the process of the 2016 coup d´État in Brazil. The analysis points to the limitations of activist translation given its responsive nature as well the over-reliance on social media, which prevents it from penetrating and consolidating in the public sphere. Still, translation as resistance and social struggle has strengthened by resorting to new creative forms of political affirmation in face of dominant narratives.