Between precarity and professionalism : assembling professional identities in the translation industry

Abstract

This thesis draws on new materialist assemblage thinking to explore how professional identities are produced in the translation industry. Translators are a largely freelance cohort that have to navigate various networks and technologies in their working lives. Assemblage thinking provides ontological and epistemological tools that have driven this project methodologically and analytically. Spurred on by a call from new materialist ideas to experiment, I have taken a mixed methods approach that combines ethnographic methods and quantitative social network analysis using Twitter data. This methods assemblage has been employed to explore the multi-layered and multi-textured nature of professional identity. Assemblage as a theoretical underpinning thus shaped the analytical process of picking apart and reconstructing the networks, technologies, people and discourses that are interwoven and produced in translation assemblages. Professional identities emerge out of the tensions inherent in self-employment in a neoliberal political economy. I explore how translators deal with these tensions; how they position themselves within networks and towards technologies; how they tussle between individual and collective needs; and how they are restricted and empowered by discourses of professionalism. Professional identity itself appears messy and complex, demonstrative of cross-scale entanglements of power, and rooted in intertwined material and discursive things.