These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.
In 1958, at the Fourth Congress of Slavists in Moscow, the debate between linguistic and literary approaches to translation reached a point where it was proposed that the best thing might be to have a separate science that was able to study all forms of translation, without being wholly within linguistics or wholly within literary studies.
[6] These initial steps toward research on literary translation were collected in James S. Holmes' paper at the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics held in Copenhagen in 1972.
In that paper, "The name and nature of translation studies", Holmes asked for the consolidation of a separate discipline and proposed a classification of the field.
A visual "map" of Holmes' proposal was later presented by Gideon Toury in his 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond.
[7] Before the 1990s, translation scholars tended to form particular schools of thought, particularly within the prescriptive, descriptive and Skopos paradigms.
The main schools of thought on the level of research have tended to cluster around key theoretical concepts, most of which have become objects of debate.
However, in the French tradition of Vinay and Darbelnet, drawing on Bally, "equivalence" was the attainment of equal functional value, generally requiring changes in form.
The discussions of equivalence accompanied typologies of translation solutions (also called "procedures", "techniques" or "strategies"), as in Fedorov (1953) and Vinay and Darbelnet (1958).
The idea that scientific methodology could be applicable to cultural products had been developed by the Russian Formalists in the early years of the 20th century, and had been recovered by various researchers in comparative literature.
Part of this application was the theory of polysystems (Even-Zohar 1990[9]) in which translated literature is seen as a sub-system of the receiving or target literary system.
Gideon Toury bases his theory on the need to consider translations as "facts of the target culture" for the purposes of research.
[16] The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analyzing the nature of transformation and interchange in cultures.
[31] In more recent studies, scholars have applied Emmanuel Levinas' philosophical work on ethics and subjectivity on this issue.
More and more translators and interpreters are being seen as active participants in geopolitical conflicts, which raises the question of how to act ethically independent from their own identity or judgement.
This leads to the conclusion that translating and interpreting cannot be considered solely as a process of language transfer, but also as socially and politically directed activities.
[36] The main translation modes under study are subtitling, film dubbing and voice-over, but also surtitling for the opera and theatre.
[40] Depending on the feature that each scholar considers the most important, different terms have been used to label "non-professional translation".
These practices are mostly supported by a strong and consolidated fan base, although larger non-professional translation projects normally apply crowdsourcing models and are controlled by companies or organizations.
Localization usually concerns software, product documentation, websites and video games, where the technological component is key.
For these reasons, translation education is an important field of study that encompasses a number of questions to be answered in research.
[49] This led to the steady emancipation of the discipline and the consecutive development of a separate theoretical framework based—as are translation studies—on interdisciplinary premises.
The pandemic put a stop to international events meeting face-to-face, but to compensate for the need of scholars to meet and interact, Pilar Alderete Diez from the University of Galway (IR) with the support of Owen Harrington from Heriot-Watt University (UK) created the Children in Translation Network (CITN) in 2021 and a webinar series on translation studies and children’s literature.
The conference was held 22-23 August 2024 in Stockholm in Sweden, and around 120 persons attended from around 40 different countries with more than 80 presentations in two days.
As attested by the number of scientific articles/books in this specific area (e.g., 17,400 results on Google Scholar for the period 2017-2023; 3,338 results on EBSCO host for the same period), the creation of courses at the university level devoted solely to translation and children’s literature, the number of theses and dissertations being defended in this area, recent international conferences and networks like CITN identifying the growing interest for this discipline.
In 1995, a study of 60 countries revealed there were 250 bodies at university level offering courses in translation or interpreting.
As early as 1999, the conceptual gap between non-essentialist and empirical approaches came up for debate at the Vic Forum on Training Translators and Interpreters: New Directions for the Millennium.
The discussants, Rosemary Arrojo and Andrew Chesterman, explicitly sought common shared ground for both approaches.
[53] Interdisciplinarity has made the creation of new paradigms possible, as most of the developed theories grew from contact with other disciplines like linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology or historiography.
[55] Translation studies has shown a tendency to broaden its fields of inquiry, and this trend may be expected to continue.