Most translation research characterizes translation both as a process and as a text, the latter serving also "as an ordinary message, in a regular intrasystemic act of communication, without, however, necessarily losing its distinct identity as a special kind of message, namely a translation […]" (Toury 1980:16). Yet disciplines that have featured translation as one of their objects of study and have integrated it into their conceptual framework rarely refer to the triple articulation of translation. Such is the case of sociolinguistics, ethnography, discourse analysis, field theory, cultural studies and postcolonial studies.
Take sociolinguistics. How would a sociolinguistic approach deal with the translation example in the novel by Chamoiseau? It would probably situate partial translation on a scale of possible forms of interlingual transfer, such as loan-translation, lexical and syntactical borrowing, and lexical translation. It would also relate translation to register variation and modes of language contact like code-switching or interlanguages. However, a sociolinguistic linkage on the level of processes offers little possibility of answering questions about the narrative treatment of intratextual, partial translation within the novel, or about the relation between intratextual translation and "common" intertextual translation, such as a translation of the novel itself into another language.
Or take field theory. One may consider the category "translation" as a global carrier for a set of functions in target literatures and cultures. For instance, when studying the strategies of minority literatures in diglossic situations, such as the French Caribbean, Pascale Casanova includes "translation" among the major carriers of literary consecration:
[…] adoption de la langue dominante, autotraduction, œuvre double et double traduction symétrique, création et promotion d’une langue nationale et/ou populaire, création d'une écriture nouvelle, symbiose des deux langues. (Casanova 1999:352)
But what about the network of relations between all these forms? And how are they actually processed? And what about the constituents of both intratextual and intertextual translations (language forms, enunciation, compositional devices and so on)?
From a historiographical angle, the analysis is aimed at interrelated understandings of what happened, when, why and how, in terms of changes in the objects concerned:
• Which factors have weakened the borders between translation and writing? Was it dissatisfaction with a mainstream concept of translation? Was it the actual possibility for the concept of translation to become a prototype for a set of cultural and transcultural phenomena otherwise labeled by terms like migration, exile, diaspora, transposition and the like?
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