Literary Translation as a Nexus of Language Planning

In recent years, the discipline of Translation Studies (TS) has moved toward producing research that takes greater account of the social and cultural contexts in which literary translations are produced (Bassnett, 2010). As a result, the writings of TS theorists are generating insights that are increasingly relevant to the concerns of sociolinguistics. In particular, their written speech—taken as sociolinguistic data itself—evinces discourses of language policy and planning (LPP) both overtly and covertly (Shohamy, 2006). This paper builds a framework to research these discourses, synthesizing theoretical and analytic contributions from both the TS and LPP literatures. It then examines four distinct case studies, to demonstrate the various ways that LPP activities and approaches have been manifested through literary translation and the secondary scholarship of TS. The overall aim of this paper is to initiate an ongoing conversation about literary and other forms of translation as pertinent objects of inquiry in LPP studies and sociolinguistics more generally.