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

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

Open Access
|Dec 2025

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.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0023 | Journal eISSN: 2067-5712 | Journal ISSN: 1583-6401
Language: English
Page range: 265 - 278
Published on: Dec 23, 2025
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2025 Maria-Teodora Creangă, published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.