Concepts of translators and translation in online social media: construal and contestation

Abstract

This article focuses on the conceptual representation of ‘the translator’ and ‘translation’ in online social media. It constructs a theoretical framework for the analysis by drawing on two bodies of work: (a) existing theorizations of conceptualizations of ‘the translator’ and ‘translation’, and (b) research on social media as a computational, discursive, and performative space in which people construct identity configurations in relation to broader social and ideological discourses. The article focuses on how concepts of translators and translation are enlisted in these processes, and the theoretical framework developed is illustrated by a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of a sample of 2,639 tweets relating to the 2021 debate on Amanda Gorman’s translators, focusing on how discourses from the traditional news media are invoked by the sharing of links, and how the tweets themselves discursively construct translation and translators.