ABSTRACT
For better and worse, the endeavour of queer/LGBT translating has tended historically toward forms of ‘commons-based peer production’, rather than toward current models of capitalist crowdsourcing and the highly individualised translation and interpreting professions of today. 1 Driven often by no other shared impetus than the ‘commons’ of their embodied dissidence towards imposed norms, queer people have tended to slide sideways into translating, long before adulthood, and often before knowing that what they were doing was called ‘translating’ at all. 2 Indeed, centuries before the Internet regularised the potential for collective decentralised modular productivity, queer feeling propelled the most unrelated of persons around the planet to live on and make do by borrowing, smuggling, manipulating or fabulating queer meanings out of someone else’s fleetingly glimpsed idiom. 3 Even as global translational equivalence appears to be emerging as one of capitalism’s most strident 21st-century ambitions (Rafael 2016, 190), queer translation has never had the makings of an effectively coordinated global agenda. In most situations involving queer translation work, whether recent or historically remote, urgency has tended to take precedence over method, misappropriation over equivalence, excess/paucity over mediation, chance over design, and desire over order. Take as one touchstone the wayward origin story of James S. Holmes (1924–1986), one of the gay forebears of modern translation studies:
I began life as an Iowa farm boy and went to high school […] where it was quite unheard of anyone wanting to learn a foreign language. […] And for some reason or other, from the very beginning, learning another language – I was, of course, terribly hooked on poetry – [I] got all tied up with immediately trying to translate poems from that other language into English. Of course, my first attempts were miserable.
(Holmes 1989, 57)