As a meaningful manifestation of how institutionalized the discipline has become, the Handbook of Translation Studies (HTS) is most welcome. It joins the other signs of maturation such as Summer Schools, the development of academic curricula, historical surveys, journals, book series, textbooks, terminologies, bibliographies and encyclopedias.

The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation and interpreting and providing easy access to a large range of topics, traditions, and methods to a relatively broad audience: not only students who often adamantly prefer such user-friendliness, researchers and lecturers in Translation Studies, Translation & Interpreting professionals; but also scholars and experts from other disciplines (among which linguistics, sociology, history, psychology). In addition the HTS addresses any of those with a professional or personal interest in the problems of translation, interpreting, localization, editing, etc., such as communication specialists, journalists, literary critics, editors, public servants, business managers, (intercultural) organization specialists, media specialists, marketing professionals.

Moreover, The HTS offers added value. First of all, it is the first handbook with this scope in Translation Studies that has both a print edition (also available as a PDF e-book) and an online version. The advantages of an online version are obvious: it is more flexible and accessible, and in addition, the entries can be regularly revised and updated. The HTS is variously searchable: by article, by author, by subject. The online version also gradually adds translations of individual entries in several other world languages, mostly in collaboration with translation departments worldwide.

A second benefit is the interconnection with the selection and organization principles of the online Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB). The taxonomy of the TSB has been partly applied to the selection of entries for the HTS. Moreover, many items in the reference lists are hyperlinked to the TSB, where the user can find an abstract of a publication.

All articles (between 500 and 6,000 words) are written by specialists in the different subfields and are peer-reviewed.

Last but not least, the usability, accessibility and flexibility of the HTS depend on the commitment of people who agree that Translation Studies does matter. All users are therefore invited to share their feedback.

Translations in other languages

The Handbook is published in English and we have started to add translations of individual entries to the online edition in the following languages:  Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. The translations can be offered as challenging projects to translation students, of which the results will be published online. If you’re interested in producing or coordinating translations of the HTS entries or if you have additional questions, please contact the editorial team at [email protected].

Suggestions

The Editors of the Handbook of Translation Studies Online appreciate your help in pointing out gaps, inadequacies, misspellings and the like in the Handbook entries. The Editors can best be reached by sending an email message to [email protected].
Thank you very much for helping us build a key reference work for the field of translation studies.