What is Queer Translation?

In 1990, the editors of Translation, History, and Culture suggested that the new emerging trends in the theory and practice of translation attest to a "cultural turn" in translation studies (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990). Like many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences influenced by the critical theories and practices of cultural studies, translation studies saw a shift in the very understanding of its own terminology, scope, and concerns, which were now challenged most notably by feminist and postcolonial theories that drew critical attention to the intricacies of power, ideology, and ethics involved in the work of translation, as well as to the translator's agency.² Bassnett later concluded that "the development of Translation Studies in the 1990s can best be seen as the establishment of a series of new alliances that brought together research into the history, practice and philosophy of translation with other intellectual trends" (2002, 10).

Queer theory came late to the party, despite that it made itself known in academia in the very same years as the cultural turn in translation studies. Recently, two edited volumes have been attempting to fill this gap by bringing queer theory and translation studies into dialogue through the notion of queer translation. It seems surprising, however, that a "notoriously slippery term" such as queer (Epstein and Gillett 2017, 1)—the proclaimed marker of non-binary difference, famous for its in principle strangeness, indeterminacy, and malleability—ends up looking pretty familiar once it is paired up with translation in the concept "queer translation"; so much so, that it will hardly baffle anyone to learn that new concepts of translation made possible by the cultural turn "mark it out as always already queer and as an appropriate metaphor for the exploration of queerness itself" (1). Gesturing in the so-called critical, tiredly rehearsed deconstructionist strategy that has been dominating queer theory, the editors of Queer in Translation consider it "the first multi-focus in-depth study on translating queer, queering translation, queer as translation and translation as queer" (7). Conversely, the editors of Queering Translation, Translating the Queer are more interested in how "queer theory can support an interrogation of the dominant models of the theory and practice of translation" (Baer and Kaindl 2018a, 2) than in the common ground between...