Call for Papers

Miller et al (2001, p.1) claim in Globalization and Sport that 'Sport is probably the most universal aspect of popular culture. It crosses languages and countries to captivate spectators and participants, as both a professional business and a pastime'.

In a globalised world, much sport has a vast international audience and consequently generates enormous income and extensive media coverage. In some of the most highly mediated sports many of the sportsmen and women come from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds which means that they must be able to adapt to often greatly differing occupational, linguistic and social environments during their careers. Depending on the extent of linguistic diversity of the contexts within which sportsmen and women in each sport operate, they come into contact with, or are subject to, intercultural mediation of various types and degrees.

The particularly high economic stakes in many international sports raise interesting questions for translation studies scholars as to how economic forces affect translation policy and practice in the environments in which these highly mobile, globalised workers move.

The aim of this panel is to turn the spotlight of translation studies onto a domain of considerable intercultural activity which the discipline has not yet investigated in any detail, with a view to uncovering questions which can provide ways of better understanding the issues affecting intercultural mediation for mobile workers in wider society.

Possible topics could include:

• what effect does transnational media representation of sportsmen and women have on general perceptions of foreign workers?
• do high financial stakes in the sports industry lead to translation gaps being manipulated by the media or other agents? What kinds of power relationships operate in this context?
• do these mobile workers become members of multicultural or integrated groups?
• to what extent are translators and interpreters cultural brokers in this context?

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a Lecturer in French Language and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia. His research encompasses news translation with specific reference to the football industry, and stage translation with an emphasis on translation in performance. Recent and forthcoming publications include 'The journalist, the translator, the player and his agent: games of (mis)representation and (mis)translation in British media reports about non-anglophone football players', in Maher, B., and Wilson, R., (eds.) Words, Images and Performances in Translation (London and New York: Continuum) (forthc. 2011); (with Dalmasso) 'Musical realisations: a performance-based translation of rhythm in Koltès' Dans la solitude des champs de coton', in Baines R., Marinetti C. and Perteghella M. (eds) Staging Translation: Text and Theatre Practice. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) 95-106 (2011).