Have there been advances in Translation Studies?

The short answer, at least with respect to TS in western Europe, Canada and the U.S., is: yes and no.

The first step in answering the title question is to identify the status of the field. Let’s assume (though figures are not available) that most people active in TS are people appointed to positions in translation schools. Translation schools are like law, engineering and music schools/faculties in that their main function—for which they receive funding—is to train students for a profession outside the university. The main business of music schools is to produce opera singers, violin players and composers, not musicologists. Similarly, the main business of translation schools is to produce translators and interpreters, not translation theorists. A translation school is not like a physics or history department.

If this is so, then advances in TS would be advances in its contributions to translator training. There have certainly been pedagogical advances, starting decades ago with the realization that translating literary texts was not the way to train people for medical, legal or commercial translation work, and that (at least in most countries) the emphasis needed to be on translation into the students’ first language, not their second or third language (as was the focus in translation for language learning purposes). A second, related advance was to hire professional translators to teach practice courses. More recent advances include the introduction of translation diaries, peer correction of translations, group translation projects, classroom use of machine aids, and revision of Wikipedia translations (including online interaction with the original translators).

Of course, certain advances in the theoretical understanding of translation may well be able to contribute to translator training. For example, skopos theory led many instructors to specify to students who the readers of a translation would be and why they would be reading it.

Quite apart from that, some people active in TS have appointments in departments of linguistics, cultural studies and other subjects where the main purpose is not to turn out professionals who will work outside universities. So then, what advances have there been in our understanding of translation?

Certainly there has been a large accumulation of facts, as people study particular translations, retranslations and historical schools of translators for example, or conduct observational studies of translators at work. But so far these facts have not made it possible to confirm any hypotheses; there are no empirical discoveries. Thus there have been proposals going back a quarter of a century now about universals of translation, but no universal has actually been confirmed to scholars’ general satisfaction. As for what goes on in translators’ minds as they work, all we know of a general nature is that different translators work differently.

On the other hand, there have certainly been many advances in how we look at translation, the point of view brought to bear.

A first advance, going back well over 50 years now, before the constitution of TS as a recognized discipline around 1980, was the very idea of seeing translation as such as worthy of study, rather than seeing it as a merely practical adjunct of something else (literary publishing, law, healthcare, journalism, language learning, etc). This was perhaps first seen in the former Soviet Union by Fedorov in the early 1950s, and then in the U.S. by Nida (what at first appeared to be statements about translation as an adjunct of missionary work were seen to be applicable to translation in general). Holmes outlined such a field of study at the 3^rd international congress of applied linguistics in 1972.

Another early advance was seeing that the comparison of source text and translation was not a matter of comparative grammar or lexicology. Studying translation was studying texts, not language systems. So it was not applied linguistics, even though linguistics could provide concepts and terminology with which to analyse and talk about the language used in texts.

The first really big breakthrough, due to Toury and others in the later 1970s, was the idea of focusing on the target situation as the site where explanations of translational phenomena would be found. This led on in the following decades to textual studies based on the idea of translational norms, but also more generally to sociological and historical considerations about the causes and effects of translations, taking the field beyond the linguistic, to translation and globalization, translation and immigration, translation and conflict, and so on. One side-effect of this was that the number of language pairs discussed in TS journals began to expand, an important advance since any generalizations about translation obviously have to be true of language pairs around the world. In addition, the key role of the commissioner came to the fore, the person or organization that picks a text for translation for some reason.

At the same time, others had the idea that we needed to know not just about the products but about the process of translation, what goes on in the minds of translators as they work. So a cognitive approach joined a sociological one beginning in the mid 1980s. More generally, a more empirical attitude to the person of the translator appeared: rather than simply praise or criticize translators, or pretend they are transparent windows, scholars began to look at the traces of the translator’s presence in the wording of the translation.

Then in the early 1990s came the idea of comparing translations not to their sources but to original writing in the target language. And the idea that there might be universals in the relationship between source and target or the relationship between target and original TL writing.

The previous failure of TS to see the translation industry as a possible object of study began to be overcome as people started to look into what actually happens in translation workplaces and in translating institutions, the details of how translations come about, the conflict between quality and time/money, translation as a business, part of the economy.

In connection with this, once Internet-connected machines became prevalent on the desks of practicing translators in the later 1990s, and some translators began to draw on machine translation and translation memory output in their daily work, TS began to look at the relationship between human and machine (or machine-assisted) translation. A few voices had raised this question as early as the 1950s, but it had never been seriously taken up within the field. Indeed, with the partial exceptions of terminology banks, software/website localization, and the new practice of respeaking, machine aids are still mainly studied within the subfield of computational linguistics rather than within TS.

Finally, the early study of film subtitling has broadened out to multimedia and audiovisual translation more generally. However while a few people have looked at the commonalities of written, spoken and signed translation, these still tend to be studied and taught for the most part in isolation from each other.

The current situation: The effects of the multiple origins of TS—in language learning and translator training, in linguistics and in literary studies—are still with us. Some people in the field study translation as the work of translators (formerly students and professionals, now also volunteers) while others study it in relation to a variety of other fields and subfields, both old (comparative linguistics, hermeneutics) and new (cultural studies, adaptation studies, gender studies, etc.).