Book Description

As culture and society has become more digitalized, especially when computer science and digital technologies have entered a new era in the twenty-first century, translation studies began to utilize a wide range of tools to enhance its reading of texts and contexts, without which translation both as a practice and as a theorization could barely persist. It has become more apparent that two extreme poles between macro and micro visions have formed the diversified terrains of translation studies. On the one hand, technologies like NLP, topic modeling, network analysis and data visualization make distant reading become possible, thus allowing us to have a paradigmatic view of how human’s ideas, beliefs, values, knowledge and even emotions have spread in some patterns across cultural, geographical and language divides in world history. On the other hand, corpus methods, such as the use of keywords, collocates and concordance lines changed the way by which texts were closely read from linear to vertical. With microscope like corpus tools, we could go deeper into the texture for perception of nuanced meaning. While considering a fact that translation is seldom mono modal in conveying meaning, we have to reconceptualize context as a multimodal environment where audio, visual and other resources interact to convey and make meaning. With regard to the fast development of digital technology, translation studies take an active role in gaining an enhanced capability in promoting transformation. Complexity has been favored in terms of theoretical framework and methodology. New questions are asked; old ones revisited with novel tools; but more areas wait to be cultivated and more questions to be approached by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. We could ask if digital technologies would bring new innovation to study of translation history, a heavily-walled land for traditional humanists who tend to repeat “so-what” to question the less significance of data-driven studies. The idea of high-quality machine translation has become so realistic in today’s market that translation educators have to face the shock wave it brought to translation learners and practitioners and rethink the relation between human translators and algorithms. Machine-translation-assisted communication could help remove boundaries for better communication; but at the same time, it also creates conflicts and leads to confrontation. Thus understood, it is imperative to give a concerned attention to digital translation studies, that is, to study translation by resorting to and drawing on the digital technologies. This Research Topic is intended to promote current directions and new developments in cross-disciplinary critical discourse research. We welcome papers which, from a critical-analytical perspective, deal with contemporary social, scientific, political, economic, or professional discourses and genres. Papers addressing the highlighted topics are especially welcome. In giving weight to these topics, we wish to call to attention some of the most pressing problems currently facing the world.