"Schwierige Übersetzung" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
"Migrationsdynamik prägt Selbstübersetzungen in der Wissenschaft" (Petra Giegerich)
Over the last decade, armed conflicts, oppression, and poverty have forced millions of people into flight from their homes. Meanwhile, over the last several decades, the globalized economy has enticed people in various careers to relocate—both eastward and westward—for work. These contemporary migrational dynamics have promoted a focus within Translation Studies on geographic relocation as a driving force behind interlinguistic and -cultural transmission of (translated) texts, of loan words, (translated) concepts, and (appropriated) traditions. The description and analysis of migratory processes qualify as interesting objects for Translation Studies because authors who migrate seldom fully “arrive.” They tend to swing, voluntarily and involuntarily, back and forth between the languages and cultures of their new and old “homes.” This linguistic and cultural pendulum motion of migrational (self)translators poses in turn methodological challenges to the conventional understanding of translation as a teleological move from source to target texts and cultures (cf. Inghilleri’s Translation and Migration (2017) and Polezzi’s special issue of Translation Studies (2012), also titled Translation and Migration). The figure of the self-translator commands special interest within the migrational turn in Translation Studies, and yet the field has devoted far more attention to literary authors and their strategies than to other self-translating “crosscultural interlocutors” and “culture brokers” (Cordingley 2013, 7). The supposition is that literary self-translators often enjoy unusually wide latitude in their translational choices (Castro, Mainer, and Page 2017) although such freedom is just as readily observable in the work of self-translating academics (Keller and Willer 2020). To break with this traditional privileging of literary forms of discursive participation, this special issue explicitly aims at highlighting the centrality of academic migrants who, on the one hand, influence their host cultures through the work of self-translation within institutional spaces of knowledge production and, on the other hand, are influenced by their new cultural and linguistic work environment. For displaced academics to continue research abroad requires complex acts of self-translation, not only into a new academic language, but also into a new academic and intellectual culture, and these self-translations leave neither the host discourses and cultures nor the self-translating actors themselves unaffected. An intellectual history of academic migration has the challenging task of investigating why certain self-translations achieve influence by accounting for social, linguistic, discursive, disciplinary, and institutional mechanisms of adaptation, integration, and advancement.