Translation Ideologies and the Transnational Movement of Ideas

Abstract This article examines the role of translation in Iranian intellectual life. By taking translation as its ethnographic object, the article attends carefully to debates on translations and to Iranian translators’ multiple, contentious approaches to translation as a social practice. It asks: What is at stake in these debates? How do they inform the popularity and availability of translated works of the human sciences in Iran? The article addresses these questions by drawing on work in linguistic anthropology to examine translation ideologies present in Iran today. Translation ideologies are shared, social orientations that inform how, why, and which individuals engage with translation. Through a careful examination of three translation ideologies, the article provides insight into how translators take up and promote certain ideas via their choices surrounding translation in contemporary Iran. This article illuminates how shared perspectives on the translation of Western human sciences directly inform which texts are selected for translation, thereby shaping the transnational movement of ideas. This examination of translation ideologies provides a deeper understanding of Iranian intellectual life and its political stakes, and it invites us to reflect more critically on the concept of translation itself.