Risk in translation

Kayo Matsushita
Rikkyo University
Table of contents

From COVID-19 to climate change, the society we live in today is filled with uncertainty. The need for risk management has never been higher and translation is no exception. Since the mid-2000s, translation studies (TS) has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of researchers interested in exploring the relationship between risk and translation. Among them, two approaches have emerged. One focuses on the influence of risk on translator decision-making (e.g., Pym 2015; Pym and Matsushita 2018; Matsushita 2019; Pym 2020), and the other centers around the economic implications of risk management in the translation industry (e.g., Lammers 2011; Nitzke, Hansen-Schirra, and Canfora 2019; Nurminen 2019; Canfora & Ottmann 2020). The former has raised many questions worthy of scholarly attention which will be the main focus of this entry. The latter includes practical advice to the stakeholders of translation projects (e.g., project managers, clients, translators, post-editors), which will also be discussed though to a lesser extent.

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Further essential reading

Angelone, Erik
2010 “Uncertainty, Uncertainty Management, and Metacognitive Problem Solving in the Translation Task.” In Translation and Cognition, ed. by Gregory M. Shreve, and Erik Angelone, 17–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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2016 “Risk Analysis as a Heuristic Tool in the Historiography of Interpreters: For an Understanding of Worst Practices.” In New Insights in the History of Interpreting, ed. by Kayoko Takeda, and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, 247–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar