Translators are not alone: Contra-instrumentalism as a Sociological Paradigm to Audiovisual Translation

Abstract

In 2021, the Netflix series « Squid Game » arouse controversy vis-à-vis the quality of the
translation. Everyone blamed translators subtitlers for their “unfaithful” and “misleading”
translation. However, a look at Netflix’s translation requirements will provide us with an answer
to this problem; translators are told what they should do. Hence, the present work aims at exploring
the concept of “contra-instrumentalism” as suggested by Venuti (2019). A considerable number
of translation assumptions and maxims are instrumentalized and believed to be facts. The fact that
affects the way translation is received in the target culture. This paper focuses on four main points:
what is meant by sociology of translation, why the need for a translation sociology, how translation
sociology affects translation studies, and contra-instrumentalism as a sociological model of
translation.The paper sketches out the main sociological models of translation from Bourdieu
(1972), to Manttari (1984), to Toury (1995), to Chasterman (2007), etc. then; it explores the
concept of contra-instrumentalism in translation, and the main challenges of investing such
paradigm in the study of translation sociology. As case study, examples from associations and
companies’ requirements to translators are explored. The main hypotheses of this study are: contrainstrumentalism is extremely insightful to the study of translation in the sense that it offers a wide
range of methods and prospects; or it is highly complicated since it is connected to a set of concepts
(hermeneutics, discourse analysis, semiotics, etc). A descriptive method is adopted regarding the
research problem