A scientometric review of research in Translation Studies in the twenty-first century
Abstract
The field of Translation Studies has expanded rapidly in the twenty-first century, largely due to the growing demand for translation and interpreting professionals. This study provides a scientometric review of Translation Studies to identify its developmental trends and patterns over the past two decades. Document co-citation analysis was conducted on 6007 journal articles published in the fifteen translation studies journals indexed in the Web of Science between January 2001 and December 2020. Twelve document co-citation analysis networks were generated and compared. Quantitative analyses, including temporal and structural metrics, confirmed the robustness and reliability of a network comprising ten discrete research clusters. A timeline view was generated to visualize how these clusters have evolved over time. Ten clusters were identified as major research subdomains in Translation Studies, namely translation competence, translation in conflict zones, translator training, collaborative translation, translation and society, language policy, post-editing and revision, media translation, the translation profession, and web localization. In addition, burst detection analysis identified the twenty most influential publications in this sample. Based on these findings, we discuss how the observed trends in each cluster contribute to further developments in Translation Studies. The implications for teaching, research, and theory are discussed and some methodological guidelines are proposed for future research.
Publication history
Table of contents
Translation has played an essential role in promoting trade, religion, and scholarship exchange between societies for centuries (Munday 2016). Partly due to this historical significance, Translation Studies (TS) emerged as an academic discipline in the second half of the twentieth century and continues to undergo changes in its paradigms, models, and methodologies (Van Doorslaer 2007, 223; Candel-Mora and Vargas-Sierra 2013, 318; Li 2015, 184; Munday 2016, 43). To delineate the scope and focal areas of TS, a number of scholars have attempted to identify historical and disciplinary movements in this field (Hatim and Munday 2004; Holmes [1988] 2004; Snell-Hornby 2006), although some of these attempts have been criticized for their parochial outlook. Notably, Holmes’s ([1988] 2004) tripartite model of descriptive, theoretical, and applied TS has been critiqued for its emphasis on text rather than translators (Chesterman 2009; Pym 2010). It has been argued that technological innovation and social development have driven TS beyond linguistics into the cultural, cognitive, and sociological research domains (Chesterman 2009, 2019).
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