Mona Baker

University of Oslo · Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education

This conceptual paper argues the need for narrative preparedness, understood as the ability to engage and empathize with peoples’ stories and the values they encode, assess them based on the universe in which people live, and acknowledge the narrative rationality of each story – even when it conflicts with the rationality of science. Expanding ‘hea...

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or i...

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or i...

Chapter 5 examines some of the rationales for pharmaceutical interventions, especially vaccines, and resistance to them. Vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaccine activists have questioned different aspects of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, and some have even argued that the whole virus is a scam and part of a plot to profit from selling vaccines. The...

This chapter examines disagreements about mass public health measures such as lockdowns and physical distancing, which have dominated discussions around Covid-19. Policy-oriented discourses such as recommendations and media briefings have argued for more or less severe measures, ranging from national curfews to mandated physical distancing, or miti...

This chapter outlines the overall aims and rationale for the book and explains how it differs from two established models in the study of medicine: evidence-based medicine and narrative medicine. It argues that science is inevitably and inextricably embedded in a multitude of narratives told by both scientists and non-scientists and further acknowl...

The final chapter revisits some of the tenets of the narrative paradigm, based on the analyses presented in the preceding three chapters, and suggests ways in which the concept of narrative rationality may be further developed and nuanced. Fisher distinguishes between objectivist knowledge and praxial knowledge and argues that it is the latter type...

Arguments about the pros and cons and possible effectiveness of face masks have occupied considerable space in specialist, medical venues such as peer-reviewed journals and science blogs as well as public forums such as mainstream media and social media – the latter attracting contributions from medical specialists and lay members of the public ali...

This chapter provides a theoretical basis for examining the tension between scientific and lay rationality that continues to undermine attempts to address such vital healthcare issues as vaccine hesitancy or lack of compliance with regulations and test regimes during a pandemic. It outlines the main tenets of the narrative paradigm, acknowledges cr...

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or i...

Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process tha...

This is the first authoritative reference work to map the multifaceted and vibrant site of citizen media research and practice, incorporating insights from across a wide range of scholarly areas. Citizen media is a fast-evolving terrain that cuts across a variety of disciplines. It explores the physical artefacts, digital content, performative inte...

Introduction to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media

The future and how we envision and anticipate it has been the subject of scholarly attention for some time, especially from political theorists, scholars of human geography, and anthropologists. This article draws on some of this literature, but particularly the work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, the Italian Marxist theorist and activist, to explore th...

This study examines conceptions of outsiders to the polity, focusing on the lexical items migrant(s), refugee(s), and exile(s) in both internet- and print-based sources. Drawing primarily on a subsection of the Genealogies Internet Corpus consisting of left-wing sources, I argue that left-wing politics is currently caught up in the rhetoric of the...

Este artigo examina a gênese, a dinâmica e o posicionamento de grupos ativistas de tradutores e intérpretes envolvidos em diversas formas de ação coletiva.O ativismo desses grupos é distinto pelo fato de eles usarem suas habilidades linguísticas para ampliar o espaço narrativo e dar poder às vozes invisibilizadas pelo poder global do inglês e da po...

The idea of prefiguration is widely assumed to derive from anarchist discourse; it involves experimenting with currently available means in such a way that they come to mirror or actualise the political ideals that inform a movement, thus collapsing the traditional distinction between means and ends. Practically all the literature on prefiguration...

This article draws on narrative theory and the notion of framing, the latter as developed in the literature on social movements, to explore various ways in which translators and interpreters accentuate, undermine or modify contested aspects of the narrative(s) encoded in the source text or utterance. Starting with an outline of the assumptions and...

For reasons to do with the spread and intensity of armed conflicts since the early 1990s and the increased visibility of translators and interpreters that accompanied this development, scholars both within and outside translation studies have begun to engage with various aspects of the role and positioning of translators and interpreters in war zon...

Successful supervision of doctoral research is a defin - ing feature and prerequisite to the survival of any research group within the academy. Within translation studies, unlike sociology for instance, relatively few scholars have acquired extensive ex- perience in research supervision, and the discipline as a whole has so far paid little attentio...

This introduction to the ITT special issue on Ethics and the Curriculum argues the need to engage more systematically with ethical issues in the context of translator and interpreter training, particularly in view of recent technological, social, political and professional developments that are yet to be explored in the literature in terms of ethic...

Translation and interpreting studies is now a vast and growing area of scholarship. This essay offers a broad overview of some of its main concerns, focusing on a number of themes that have received growing attention in the 1990s and the early part of the twenty-first century. These are: representation; minority–majority relations; globalization, t...

This chapter offers an overview of narrative theory as it has been applied in the field of Translation Studies. It starts by outlining the theoretical assumptions that underpin the narrative approach, and then explains and exemplifies two sets of conceptual tools used in the analysis of translation and interpreting events from a narrative perspecti...

This article examines the genesis, dynamics and positioning of activist groups of translators and interpreters who engage in various forms of collective action. The activism of these groups is distinctive in that they use their linguistic skills to extend narrative space and empower voices made invisible by the global power of English and the polit...

This introduction to the ITT special issue on Ethics and the Curriculum argues the need to engage more systematically with ethical issues in the context of translator and interpreter training, particularly in view of recent technological, social, political and professional developments that are yet to be explored in the literature in terms of ethic...

Constructing and disseminating ‘knowledge’ about a number of communities and regions widely designated as a security threat is now a big industry. Much of this industry relies heavily on various forms of translation and, in some cases, is generated by a team of dedicated translators working on full-blown, heavily funded programmes that involve sele...

For reasons to do with the spread and intensity of armed conflicts since the early 1990s and the increased visibility of translators and interpreters that accompanied this development, scholars both within and outside translation studies have begun to engage with various aspects of the role and positioning of translators and interpreters in war zon...

Successful supervision of doctoral research is a defining feature and prerequisite to the survival of any research group within the academy. Within translation studies, unlike sociology for instance, relatively few scholars have acquired extensive experience in research supervision, and the discipline as a whole has so far paid little attention to...

Since its inception, translation studies has arguably situated itself within structures of authority1 and continues to describe the role of translation largely from the point of view of dominant groups and constituencies.2 This s particularly evident in frameworks such as skopos theory, which prioritizes the role of the commissioner in a typically...

Corpus-based research in translation studies initially focused on similarities and differences between translated and non-translated text, in an attempt to demonstrate that translations form a distinctive textual system within any target culture. More recently, researchers have begun to turn their attention to the question of individual variation w...

Research conducted within Translation Studies has traditionally focused on comparing translations with their source texts. In recent years, however, much corpus-based research has set out to compare translated and non-translated text in the same language on the basis of what has come to be known within corpus-based Translation Studies as 'comparabl...

This article draws on narrative theory and the notion of framing, the latter as developed in the literature on social movements, to explore various ways in which translators and interpreters accentuate, undermine or modify contested aspects of the narrative(s) encoded in the source text or utterance. Starting with an outline of the assumptions and...

This article begins the exploration of some of the ways in which translation and interpreting may be embedded in a variety of projects that are set up outside the mainstream institutions of society, with agendas that explicitly challenge the dominant narratives of the time. More specifically, the essay outlines a narrative framework within which th...

Translation and Conflict demonstrates that translators and interpreters participate in circulating as well as resisting the narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent conflict. Drawing on narrative theory and using numerous examples from historical and contemporary conflicts, the author provides an original and cohere...

The notion of context has been extensively invoked but rarely critiqued and elaborated in the study of translation and interpreting. This paper first explores recent thinking on the notions of context and contextualization in pragmatics and linguistic anthropology and examines the extent to which these notions have explicitly or implicitly informed...

This article questions one of the narratives that dominate our disciplinary and professional discourses on translation, namely the narrative of translation as a means of promoting peace, tolerance and understanding through enabling communication and dialogue to take place. It starts with a theoretical overview of the dimensions and some of the main...

Corpus-based research throws up a number of methodological challenges. Many of these are evident in any type of research which attempts to compare authentic data of any kind, but the difficulties are accentuated by the availability of vast amounts of data in this case. In particular, questions relating to how one selects the features to be compared...

Translation studies has inherited from literary studies its preoccupation with the style of individual creative writers and from linguistics the preoccupation with the style of social groups of language users. It also inherited from both disciplines the association of style with `original' writing. Little or no attention has been paid so far to the...

This paper sets out to provide evidence of explicitation in translation into English through an analysis of patterns of inclusion and omission of optional that with the reporting verbs SAY and TELL. The notion of explicitation in the context of translation is first introduced and explained. An overview of the literature relating to that-clauses in...

The Translational English Corpus held at the Centre for Translation Studies at UMIST is a computerised collection of authentic, published translations into English from a variety of source languages and by a wide range of professional translators. This resource provides the basis for investigating a range of issues related to the distinctive nature...

Résumé L'approche basée sur le corpus requiert le développement d'une méthodologie cohérente pour l'identification des caractéristiques propres à la langue de la traduction. En plus de corroborer l'hypothèse du "troisième code", cette méthodologie servira à comprendre les contraintes, les pressions et les motivations qui influencent spécifiquement...

: Corpus-based research has become widely accepted as a factor in improving the performance of machine translation systems, and corpus-based terminology compilation is now the norm rather than the exception. Within translation studies proper, Lindquist (1984) has advocated the use of corpora for training translators, and Baker (1993a) has argued th...

This paper describes the development of a new range of bilingual dictionaries which are based on translating the explanations in monolingual Cobuild dictionaries2 into the user's mother tongue. These dictionaries have been designed by Cobuild's Editor-in-Chief, John Sinclair, primarily to address the needs of language learners. The philosophy which...