Unspoken Power: Sidestepping Bourdieu’s ‘Symbolic Power’ in Translation Studies

Abstract Although the issue of translation as power has been the central topic of many pieces of research over the past years, some of which being based on Bourdieu’s work on ‘symbolic power’ and its underlying principles, theorists in translation studies have failed so far to adequately integrate this key concept into the new theoretical framework generated by this sociological perspective. In this article, I will argue that since linguistics has already integrated the concept of ‘symbolic power’ successfully, thereby marking the emergence of a new perspective on language as a symbolic system, translation studies, as an interdisciplinary field, should follow suit and benefit from the advantages that such an approach may offer both on a theoretical as well as on a practical level.