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      Narrative inquiry of translators’ identities: A study of meaning-making in narrating knowledge

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          Abstract

          Translators have generated retrospective accounts of their working experience, which contribute to an expansive corpus of knowledge on translation. A plethora of research has explored how this knowledge could enrich our perception of varied questions concerning translation process, strategies, norms, and other social and political respects within conflictual settings in which translation has engaged. In contrast, few attempts have been made to gain a translator-centered understanding of what this knowledge could mean for its narrators. In line with narrative inquiry, this article proposes a human-centered approach to translator’s knowledge narrating and a shift from positivistic to post-positivistic investigation into specific questions about how translators make sense of who they are as well as the meaning of their lives by structuring their experiences into a sequential and meaningful narrative. The general question is what strategies are employed to construct what types of identities. A holistic and structured analysis of five narratives by senior Chinese translators involves macro and micro dimensions. With a view to methods employed by scholars in different fields, the study identifies four types of narratives, namely, personal, public, conceptual/disciplinary, and metanarrative, which are used throughout our cases. Micro-analysis of narrative structure demonstrates that life events are often arranged in a chronological sequence, among which critical events are favored to indicate a turning point or crisis for transformation. Storytellers tend to adopt strategies of personalizing, exemplifying, polarizing, and evaluating to construct their identities and what translation experience means to them. This article concludes that apart from communicating translation knowledge, translators make sense of what translation experience means to them as a professional translator and more importantly as a real person living through social–cultural–political vicissitudes, thus contributing to a more translator-centered vision of translation knowledge.

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          Most cited references55

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          Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

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            Narrative Research

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              Documents of Life 2

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                30 January 2023
                2023
                : 14
                : 1070178
                Affiliations
                Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University , Shanghai, China
                Author notes

                Edited by: Antonio Bova, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Italy

                Reviewed by: Mahmoud Afrouz, University of Isfahan, Iran; Kenneth Y. T. Lim, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Libo Huang, Xi’an International Studies University, China

                *Correspondence: Qiang Geng, gengqiang@ 123456shisu.edu.cn

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1070178
                9922882
                9757cfab-7ad6-4844-9986-2ddb4e39b51e
                Copyright © 2023 Geng.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 14 October 2022
                : 03 January 2023
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 5, Equations: 0, References: 55, Pages: 10, Words: 9972
                Funding
                Funded by: National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences, doi 10.13039/501100012325;
                Award ID: 20BYY028
                This research was funded by the research program “Study of Implicit Translation Discourse in Key Documents of CPC” (20BYY028) funded by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Science in China.
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                narrative inquiry,human-centeredness,translation experience,narrative knowledge,metanarrative,professional narrative,personal narrative,narrative identities

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