ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a detailed overview of socio-narrative theory and some of its applications in translation and interpreting studies, beginning with an account of the theory’s basic assumptions. It then explores some of the main differences between the concept of narrative, as defined and applied in this approach, and the concept of discourse, as understood and applied in Critical Discourse Analysis, and explains the theoretical and research implications of these differences. This is followed by an explanation and detailed exemplification of two sets of conceptual tools elaborated in socio-narrative theory. The first is a fluid typology of different types of narrative that has been revisited and adapted in a number of studies. The second is an interdependent set of dimensions that define narrativity and are deployed in any attempt to make sense of experience by embedding it within a narrative world. The typology proposed in Baker (2006) consists of four categories: personal, public, conceptual and meta narratives. The chapter draws on existing studies to exemplify the meaning of each category and demonstrate the dynamic interplay between them. The set of dimensions discussed and exemplified consists of temporality (covering both time and space), relationality, selective appropriation, causal emplotment, particularity, genericness, normativeness/canonicity and breach, and narrative accrual. The typology and the set of dimensions are both exemplified with reference to a diverse set of material, including poetry, theatre translation, political advocacy programmes of translation, author branding, and subtitling. The chapter ends by acknowledging the difficulty of applying this version of narrative theory in the context of existing research traditions in translation studies, and proposes a number of avenues and genres that lend themselves readily to narrative analysis and that may be explored in future research.
