Case Study 1: Pseudo-retranslation and “Hopelessness”

This chapter presents an analysis of the first corpus consisting of a “prototext” containing one source translation of a list of causes and symptoms of hopelessness (from the American Psychological Association) and its eight pseudo-retranslations in other academic texts. These texts are from education sciences, psychology, and business administration. By building on the findings in the analyses, the chapter interrogates the interplay of pseudo-retranslation with such epistemic phenomena as knowledge acquisition, knowledge generation, knowledge distribution, epistemic pollution, and corruption of scholarly communication. The chapter concludes by arguing that an academic author degrades the epistemic quality of a piece of scientific knowledge if they acquire it through erroneous translation, and that pseudo-retranslations disseminate this distorted knowledge within and across genres and disciplines.