Translation’s Value to Queer Orientations to Technical Communication: On Claims to Interpretive Authority

Abstract

This essay considers recent scholarship that adopts a queer orientation to technical communication research, education, and activism. I suggest that this scholarship would benefit from further engagement with discussions of technical genres ongoing across both queer and trans* studies, and I posit translation as a potential methodological and theoretical throughline toward such consolidation. In contrast to assumptions of translation as the neutral movement across discreet languages, this article traces how technical communicators and scholars across both queer studies and trans* studies have adopted a relational approach to translation that foregrounds the often messy, embodied negotiations of agency and power that occur as meaning is transformed across language representations and genres.