A Socio-Historical Mapping of Translation Fields from Bourdieu’s Perspective: The Field of English Self-Help Literature in Arabic Translations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This article enhances the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s social field as a heuristic conceptual tool for delineating the boundaries of translations as fields of cultural production, integrated with bibliographical research. This approach provides insights into the boundaries, agents, production, practices, and socio-historical context of the respective translation fields. Through the integration of Bourdieu’s field as a theoretical framework and bibliographical research as a methodological framework, this article assesses the quality of the application of each of them in the sociological investigation of translation fields. This article uses the postulated field of “Arabic Translations of English self-help books in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (henceforth KSA) from 1982 to 2016” as a showcase through which this combination of theoretical and methodological frameworks can be advanced to study other fields of translation across different temporal and geographical locations and among various language pairs. Through the compilation of a bibliographical database of 993 self-help translations, this article provides an example of how fields of translation can be theoretically and methodologically bounded and mapped in sociological investigations.