Why Translation Matters? Translation and Reconfiguration of Power Relations in Habsburg Galicia

Eastern Galicia has not been always a harmonious, innocent and uncontested space of intercultural communication. Popularized in the public imagination simultaneously as the Polish cultural “heartland,” the Ukrainian Piedmont, a Jewish metropolis, and a homeland to German-language incolae Galiciani, Galicia has remained a site of tension and struggle, indifference and hostile co-existence. Inter-language communication was ideologically charged as were translation practices. The debates around translations demonstrate the complexities of the political and cultural allegiance and reciprocity or resistance to the proximate “other.” Translations became meaningful episodes in a political and literary history of each ethnic community in Galicia.

Through the lens of histoire croisée, this talk will discuss several translational practices of the time, which were used as a means of consolidation of Ruthenian citizenship and institutionalization of Ruthenian culture in the public space. In the course of the 19th century translatorial intellectuals were “trend-setters” who contributed to the advancement of translations as “an expression of power.” It will be argued that while giving a déclassé idiom the authority of a translating language and of articulating then-relevant knowledge, Ruthenian “specificity” was defined through and not against regional cultural multiplicity.

Iryna Odrekhivska is Associate Professor at the Department of Translation Studies and Contrastive Linguistics at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Her teaching and research interests include translation history and historiography, sociology and ideology of Ukrainian translation, translational hermeneutics and postcolonial studies of translation. In 2018, she was Coimbra Research Fellow in the Institute of Translation Studies at the University of Graz (Austria) and an Associate at the Nida School of Translation Studies (Italy). In 2017, Iryna was a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu. Iryna Odrekhivska received her PhD from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2015, and since then she has held a full-time research and teaching position at the University of Lviv. Currently, she is an associate member of Shevchenko Scholarly Society (Division of World Literature) and European Society for Translation Studies. Odrekhivska has authored over 40 publications in the international peer-reviewed journals and in the Ukrainian academic press. She has been a speaker at a multitude of international conferences in the area of Translation and Cultural Studies (Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia). Aside from her scholarship, Iryna Odrekhivska is a translator of artistic literature and non-fiction.