Corps de l’article

Recent decades have witnessed a myriad of new approaches and concepts in translation studies. Some burgeoning activities like crowdsourcing, transediting and translanguaging, to name just a few, have gained momentum in translation studies. Concepts, like intralingual and intersemiotic translation, which are considered peripheral to translation studies have gained renewed focus. Translation studies is embracing ever-expanding boundaries. It is against this backdrop that this current volume is published. To recapitulate briefly, this book touches on the following two major trends in translation studies: the internal boundaries are blurring and the external boundaries are expanding.

Due to the upsurge of various translation activities, the internal boundaries of translation have blurred and have become fuzzy. Consequently, conceptual innovation should be prioritized. Chesterman (Chapter 1) suggests four ways for the creation of new categories and names. Platypus concepts are for the kind of new concept that is proposed when a new empirical phenomenon is confronted. Examples include fansubbing and translanguaging. Splitter concepts refer to focusing on differences and dividing related concepts into different entries. Professional vs. non-professional and literary vs. non-literary translation are typical splitter concepts in translation studies. Lumper concepts focus on similarities and tend to lump different concepts under a single entry. A case in point is the concept of translation itself. Rebranding concepts pertain to endowing an existing concept with a new term. A typical example is localization which illustrates how the notion of translation has been downgraded to a small corner of a rebranded larger practice, to highlight something presented as radically new. Chapter 3 focuses on the conceptual boundaries of interpreting. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of using any single criterion as a basis to define interpreting is well noted by the author. Thus, the author adopts the concentric-circle model of the conceptual territory of interpreting, with an inner circle representing established practices and outer circle phenomena that differ in some criteria and are therefore regarded as being less prototypical. Additionally, the expanding circle incorporates novel forms that have been driven by technology, such as transpeaking. Chapter 7 explores the fuzzy boundaries between professional and non-professional translation and interpreting. Traditionally, professional and non-professional translators and interpreters were regarded as disparate categories. However, incremental studies have been accounting for a range of mediation activities required in multifarious communicative contexts, irrespective of the question of professionalism. By looking beyond professional activities and approaching the miscellaneous phenomenon of translation and interpreting, translation studies is embracing new conceptual tools and new definitions for established frameworks. What’s more, scholars can take cognizance of translation and interpreting activities in contemporary society by looking at the broader practice rather than through the narrow prism of professional practice all alone. Chapter 9 argues that the borders between literary and non-literary translation should be fuzzy and moveable. First, the binary distinction is detrimental because it presupposes an exclusive non-reciprocal relationship. Second, a negative suffix suggests lower status and less complexity. Thirdly, the disciplines on which literary and non-literary translation draw are themselves constantly changing. Fourthly, technological and professional developments have overtaken such a simplified view of the world of translation. Concepts such as adaptation, localization, and transcreation have been much discussed in recent years. Divergent opinions of these concepts often exist between translation academia and industry. Chapter 12 attempts to turn the spotlight on the field of translation practice which has been criticized by scholars for introducing the above concepts that devalue the notion of translation. By drawing on data elicited in face-to-face interaction with the practitioners in the field, translators and translation project managers in particular, the chapter identifies some similarities and differences between translation practitioners’ and scholars’ understandings of what constitutes, on the one hand, the translation field and, on the other, a prototypical translation. In line with the view of translation scholars, translation as an umbrella concept is also disputed by practitioners. Which concepts lie within the translation category and are regarded as prototypical models are moot questions. The fuzzy boundaries between localization and adaptation as well as the overlap between localization and transcreation noticed by practitioners are also echoed by scholars. The practitioners’ partial rejection of intralingual translation and full rejection of intersemiotic translation seem to be in contradistinction to scholarly endeavors to incorporate them into translation studies. Discrepancies notwithstanding, it is encouraging to note that so many discussions in the industry seem to have found their way to academia and vice versa, which indicates that more cross-border exchanges between industry and academia are needed. Whether translation studies should focus only on interlingual replacement or whether it might be better served by a broader concept that encompasses new extensions is propounded in Chapter 13. The dominant view on translation in other disciplines is that it is a language-based practice that designs methods for translation on a normative basis. It has recently been exploding due to the incremental use of translation technology. While academic research has tended to broaden the term, the outside world restricts it to an apparently simple practice. Confronted with this paradox, the discipline can stress the division between the scholarly research and practitioners’ practices, by accepting that translation is only one of the many practices scholars study in the field of research. Consequently, a new and broader designation for the discipline can open up new perspectives in the long term. The author argues that “if it were not for the fact that popular discourses might associate it with transgender or transport, trans-studies could have covered many of the alternative terms for translation” (p. 229). The discussion of renaming translation studies, even tentatively, suggests a paradigm change in the discipline.

Translation boundaries have also been greatly expanded. As an invisible part of modern life in non-English speaking contexts, localization (Chapter 2) has contributed to expanding “the limits of translation studies and crossfertilise interdisciplinary connections” (p. 40). This definition crystallizes the necessary and sufficient conditions for interpreting, namely, human agent, bilingual competence, interlingual task, immediate performance, and faithful rendering. Arnt Lykke Jakobsen touches upon self-revision, other-revision, editing and post-editing in Chapter 4. The boundary between writing and (post-)editing has shifted due to freely available MT systems. Professional translation nowadays has less writing and less translation than editing and post-editing of text suggested by TM/MT systems. Our use of words is motivated by our will to “represent and convey the flux of our thoughts, emotions, and ideas, and so we keep on formulating, reformulating, paraphrasing, and revising them to make our meaning shareable” (p. 77). What distinguishes human translators from computers is our ability to construct relevant meaning from the text or message. Sharon O’Brien and Owen Conlan argue that the traditional boundaries between TM and MT technology are blurring, which leads to the difficulty in treating them disparately (Chapter 5). The translation profession has witnessed many changes in machine translation from translation memory, to data-driven statistical machine translation and, most recently, neural machine translation. The authors advocate that the concepts of personalization and adaptation can be deployed in e-commerce and e-learning and the most important inputs: context, motivation, user modelling, trust, and well-being. Chapter 6 focuses on translation in virtual environments, translation blogs to be specific. By adopting social network analysis and the graph visualization and manipulation program Gephi to examine three translation blog networks, the study finds that not every blog network forms a community and the three blog networks do not seem very interconnected with each other. The study also demonstrates that translation blog networks are composed of diverse actors, including non-blogging translators, non-translators who blog about other topics and organizations such as SDL Trados. Furthermore, the findings suggest that blog networks are not restricted to the geographic regions in which a blogger is based. Chapter 8 adopts the term ergonomics to describe the natural laws of work, focusing on the people involved in a situated activity. It explores the survey results of two multilingual countries and reflects on how an ergonomic perspective can provide insights into the reality of professional translation as translators cope with the translation of their work becoming increasingly machine-driven. Taking an ergonomic perspective can unearth translation-related issues and have practical implications. For example, the basic aspects of a translator’s working environment such as temperature, airflow, and noise levels should be taken seriously. Disturbances from emails, chats and phone calls should also be taken into consideration. This study demonstrates that an ergonomic perspective can provide a framework for conceptualizing research concerning the realities of the translation workplace. By investigating two examples of intralingual translation within the 19th-century Turkish literary context, Albachten (Chapter 10) finds that interlingual, intralingual translation, writing, summarizing, etc. were parts of text production in Turkish written with a different alphabet, and the boundaries between these strategies were not always clear-cut. Thus, translation scholars should be more circumspect in handling various text production strategies that were not necessarily labelled as translation according to present-day criteria. The author argues that various modes of intralingual translation are an integral part of translation history and should be incorporated into translation studies to expand the boundaries of the discipline and its research domain. Sara Laviosa (Chapter 11) expands the boundaries of pedagogic translation, an area of interdisciplinary enquiry that has recently attracted the interests of translation scholars and educationalists, by introducing the notion of translanguaging into translation studies. In order to address the issue as to what we can give to and take from the multilingual approach in educational linguistics, given our shared scholarly interests in translation and second language learning and teaching, the term translanguaging should be introduced in translation studies and become an object of study in its own right. The knowledge and expertise we have gained in the theory and practice of teacher-directed and student-directed translanguaging in bi/multilingual education would facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation incontrovertibly, which would enrich language and translation teaching in higher education.

With the advent of the information age, translation borders have been ineluctably expanded as well as blurred. This volume makes a laudable attempt to propound this trend in translation studies. It provides a quite comprehensive discussion on the expanded and blurred boundaries, catalyzed not only by some nascent translation activities, like localization and transediting (Chapter 2 and 4), but also some traditional activities, like pedagogy (Chapter 11) and literary translations (Chapter 9). The expanding boundaries of translation studies demonstrate that many scholars subscribe to a broad interpretation of some central concepts in translation studies, such as transfer or language. Transfer does not necessarily mean a close linguistic copy of the source text (Chapter 2 and 4). Language can mean the language of two dialects (Chapter 10) and two levels of formality (Chapter 7). Instead of focusing only on translation, as done by many other volumes on translation studies, this book also takes interpreting into consideration (Chapter 3 and 7). It also tries to bridge the gap between academia and industry (Chapter 12). What’s striking about the volume is its inclusion of some translation activities which are regarded as “marginal” or “peripheral.” Non-professional, non-literary translation, and intralingual translation, occupying an infinitesimal place in traditional translation studies, are elaborated in detail in the book. Scholars usually prioritized professional, literary, and interlingual translations to the detriment of the discipline. Researchers in this volume have been cognizant of the fact that translation studies will benefit from insights emanating from academic inquiries into prototypical as well as peripheral translation activities. Thus, this volume greatly expands our notions of translation.

Nonetheless, it should also be noted that the great expansion of translation boundaries should also be attributed to the nurturing of neighboring disciplines, such as sociology, philosophy, and histography, to name just a few. Translation studies, which purports to be interdisciplinary, should not only look inwards but also outwards. Concepts and tools borrowed from other disciplines will provide brand-new prisms through which different insights can be gained. What’s more, cultural factors should also be noted. Nowadays translation studies often adopts a postpositivist perspective that considers “parameters and features of translation that go far beyond the practices, products, and perspectives of a single culture” (Tymoczko 2014: 57). Lefevere once claimed that translations in China after Zhi Qian, a Buddhist scripture translator in ancient China, were done in the elegant style because “the translators realized that was the only style that would be taken seriously by the target audience of officials, literati, and intellectuals” (Lefevere 1998: 12). Although sometimes form was as important as content, or even more important, the form of translation “was to be a Chinese form, not a form that tried to carry across even a suggestion of the form of the original” (Lefevere 1998: 22). This historical example in China stands in contrast to the Western understanding of faithfulness to the form that pertains to the source text form. It is demonstrable that there is no universal definition of translation and it should be explored in different cultures across different times because “ideas and practices of translation in different cultures are not necessarily a replica of translation elsewhere, so Western models and theories of translation cannot simply be applied uncritically to other contexts” (Hung and Wakabayashi 2014: 1). Therefore, the concept of translation should be examined crossculturally, synchronically as well as diachronically.