Editorial

At the beginning of the 21st century, translation was seen as an antidote to fragmented content for multilingual and multi-skilled users. The second decade of the century projects ideas of translation as platforms that users can be part of and make sense of at the same time. A new journal entitled Translation Landscapes was founded in 2017, the translation industry association TAUS has been publishing ‘landscape reports’ on technology development impacting translation practices since 2013, and international conferences involving the notion of landscape have recently taken place. With substantial improvements in translation technology access, translation seems to be primarily an interactive tool allowing territorial cohesion rather than a specialised communication instrument.

This issue reflects these trends of interactivity, interconnectedness and diversity. Research exploring Chinese, Arabic, major European languages (German, Italian, Spanish) as well as less dominant (Danish, Flemish, Greek, Norwegian, Swedish) or local ones (Welsh) testifies to this rich web of content. Translation Studies are more interdisciplinary than ever, borrowing from social science, and deepening their collaboration with a range of disciplines from Film to Ethics. Issue 28 has been divided in four thematic sections: first, translation practices in contrasting fields are explored by Miguel Jimenez Crespo, Sharon O’Brien and Patrick Cadwell, and Elpida Loupaki. This section closes with an article uncovering the riches of the suffix –ism in English and its potential equivalents in Arabic (Jamal Giaber). The second part is devoted to Audiovisual Translation: articles discuss its interactive impact as a tool for foreign speakers of English (Jennifer Lertola and Cristina Mariotti, and Alejandro Bolaños Garcia), the phenomenon of fansubbing in China (Wang Dingkun), the challenge of dubbing in the context of an ornithological documentary (Nadja Weisshaupt), and propose a model for assessing quality in interlingual subtitling (Jan Pedersen). The third section explores translation and interpreting as regards ethics (Lluís Baixauli Olmos), perceptions of practices (Leticia Santamaria Ciordia) and areas traditionally considered peripheral to translation and interpreting performance such as sight translation (Tatjana R. Felberg and Anne Birgitta Nilsen) or revision (Isabelle S. Robert, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Jim J.J. Ureel and Aline Remael). The last part is devoted to technology: challenges of statistical machine translation in a less used language pair (Ben Screen); new tools for the next generation of translators (Elisa Alonso and Lucas Nunes Vieira) and professional translators’ attitudes towards translation crowdsourcing. Two interviews are also offered: the young researcher Iris Schrijver discusses the importance of prioritising writing skills in translation training while Karen Korning Zethsen discusses the professional translation scene in Denmark. Happy reading in this translation maze!

Lucile Desblache