Development Brokers and Translators

Author: David Lewis
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 156549217X
Category : Applied anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
* Includes essays by some of today’s leading anthropologists working in development studies. * Furthers the goals of both poverty reduction and ethnographic research by detailing their contributions to and reliance on each another. * Provides a practical and theoretical resource for development agencies, policy makers, and students wishing to access a variety of case studies and new analytical approaches. The success of any international development agency depends on an understanding of the ways in which a community and individuals relate to ideas and resources. David Lewis and David Mosse have brought together a number of anthropologists engaged in development research to show how ethnography can be an indispensable tool for understanding these complex and dynamic relationships. The world that this ethnography of development reveals does not divide neatly into the developers and the developed, perpetrators and victims, domination and resistance, or the incompatible rationalities of scientific and indigenous knowledge. It is a world in which interests and practices are always hybrids, where the realms of reason and the real world are not neatly separate, and in which rational policy representations frequently conceal the messiness of practice that precedes the ideas and technologies of development. The wealth of new ideas offered in this collection will be especially valuable to graduate students in anthropology and development studies, but also to undergraduates and those working in development organizations who wish to run more effective operations on every level. Other contributors: Tim Bending, Bina Desai, Amity Doolittle, Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Peter Luetchford, Wiebe Nauta, Sergio Rosendo, Benedetta Rossi, Oscar Salemink, and Celayne Heaton Shrestha.

Adventures in Aidland

Author: David Mosse
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857451111
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.

Translating Childhoods

Author: Marjorie Faulstich Orellana
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548632
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Though the dynamics of immigrant family life has gained attention from scholars, little is known about the younger generation, often considered "invisible." Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, brings children to the forefront by exploring the "work" they perform as language and culture brokers, and the impact of this largely unseen contribution. Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be "in the middle" or the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. Drawing from ethnographic data and research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.

Peddlers of Information

Author: Tanya Jakimow
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 1565494415
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are widely heralded as an opportunity for the poor to have greater access to information that can help them escape poverty. ICTs also provide local NGOs that work with the poor access to knowledge that can guide them in implementing better development programs. Such ideas reflect long-held notions about the role of knowledge provision as a tool for development. But as author Tanya Jakimow shows, the consequences of the information age are often unintended and deviate greatly from our image of an interconnected, modern world. Not only do most people remain largely excluded from ICTs, but when they do engage with these technologies, they do so in unforeseen ways. Peddlers of Information shows how local NGOs in rural India are actually using these technologies—particularly the internet—and the implications this has had for development work and ideas about poverty. Jakimow’s critique of dominant views on ICTs and her discussion of class and power relations in Southern organizations is essential reading for development scholars and practitioners.

The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices

Author: Sara Laviosa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190067225
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 600

Book Description
The discipline of translation studies has gained increasing importance at the beginning of the 21st century as a result of rapid globalization and the development of computer-based translation methods. Today, changing political, economic, health, and environmental realities across the world are generating previously unknown inter-language communication challenges that can only be understood through a socially-oriented and data-driven approach. The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices draws on a wide array of case studies from all over the world to demonstrate the value of different forms of translation - written, oral, audiovisual - as social practices that are essential to achieve sustainability, accessibility, inclusion, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, this timely collection illustrates the manifold interactions between translation studies and the social and natural sciences, enabling for the first time the exchange of research resources and methods between translation and other domains' experts. Twenty-nine chapters by international scholars and professional translators apply translation studies methods to a wide range of fields, including healthcare, environmental policy, geological and cultural heritage conservation, education, tourism, comparative politics, conflict mediation, international law, commercial law, immigration, and indigenous rights. The articles engage with numerous languages, from European and Latin American contexts to Asian and Australian languages, giving unprecedented weight to the translation of indigenous languages. The Handbook highlights how translation studies generate innovative solutions to long-standing and emerging social issues, thus reformulating the scope of this discipline as a socially-oriented, empirical, and ethical research field in the 21st century.

Cultures of Doing Good

Author: Amanda Lashaw
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319689
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II are explained. The wide-ranging volume is organized into thematic parts: “Changing Landscapes of Power,” “Doing Good Work,” and “Methodological Challenges of NGO Anthropology.” Each part is introduced by an original, reflective essay that contextualizes and links the themes of each chapter to broader bodies of research and to theoretical and methodological debates. A concluding chapter synthesizes how current lines of inquiry consolidate and advance the first generation of anthropological NGO studies, highlighting new and promising directions in this field. In contrast to studies about surveys of NGOs that cover a single issue or region, this book offers a survey of NGO dynamics in varied cultural and political settings. The chapters herein cover NGO life in Tanzania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Peru, the United States, and India. The diverse institutional worlds and networks include feminist activism, international aid donors, USAID democracy experts, Romani housing activism, academic gender studies, volunteer tourism, Jewish philanthropy, Islamic faith-based development, child welfare, women’s legal arbitration, and environmental conservation. The collection explores issues such as normative democratic civic engagement, elitism and professionalization, the governance of feminist advocacy, disciplining religion, the politics of philanthropic neutrality, NGO tourism and consumption, blurred boundaries between anthropologists as researchers and activists, and barriers to producing critical NGO ethnographies.

Development as Process

Author: John Farrington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134664826
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Process" approaches to economic and social development appear to be more flexible and offer greater prospects of success than traditional "project" methods. Development as Process addresses the questions raised by the different natures of the two approaches. The authors examine development projects through experience in water resources development in India and in organizational learning by a Bangladeshi NGO. Inter-agency contexts are examined in the setting of an aquaculture project in Bangladesh and in the setting of agriculture and natural resources development in Rajisthan, India. Finally, the role of process monitoring is explained in the context of policy reform, with illustrations from forestry in India and land reform in Russia.

Identity and Status in the Translational Professions

Author: Rakefet Sela-Sheffy
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027202516
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
This volume contributes to the emerging research on the social formation of translators and interpreters as specific occupational groups. Despite the rising academic interest in sociological perspectives in Translation Studies, relatively little research has so far been devoted to translators' social background, status struggles and sense of self. The articles assembled here zoom in on the groups of individuals who perform the complex translating and/or interpreting tasks, thereby creating their own space of cultural production. Cutting across varied translatorial and geographical arenas, they reflect a view of the interrelatedness between the macro-level question of professional status and micro-level aspects of practitioners' identity. Addressing central theoretical issues relating to translators' habitus and role perception, as well as methodological challenges of using qualitative and quantitative measures, this endeavor also contributes to the critical discourse on translators' agency and ethics and to questions of reformulating their social role.The contributions to this volume were originally published in Translation and Interpreting Studies 4:2 (2009) and 5:1 (2010).

The Prosperous Translator

Author: Chris Durban
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0615404030
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
A compilation of business advice columns for translators and interpreters published under the names Fire Ant & Worker Bee in online Translation Journal. Pithy tips and insights.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Author: David Bellos
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0865478724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.