Editorial

While editing this issue perhaps more than any other, I have had the sense of how much an international journal such as JoSTrans is at the forefront of the evolution of Translation Studies. In the last few years, mirroring the interest in this discipline which is no longer emergent, the number of submissions has increased dramatically and the thematic profile of texts received has become larger. Strands of interests have appeared, reflecting trends and interests as well as pre-empting them. Enthusiasm for topics relating to translation technology and (multi)media translation, always very present, has been noticeable for a while, but a widening of the spectrum of specialised translation themes is also visible. A decade ago, specialised translation was primarily associated with legal, medical and technical translation. As the current issue reveals, it now intersects broadly and visibly with many sub-areas, from education to professional ethics, from bibliometrics to quality assessment.

Issue 23 is also particularly multinational, with contributors from Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US. Although it is non-thematic, trends were visible, and articles have been clustered in three main sections: translation and technology (Garcia, Jiménez, Flanagan, Alonso, Salmi and Koponen, Mariana, Cox and Melby); audiovisual translation (Pedersen, Caniato, Crocco and Marzo, Pan, Gonzalez Vera, Sánchez, Szarkowska and Anna Jankowska); and a final section, gathering contributions on legal translation, medical translation and translation training (Ruiz Rosendo and Conniff, Pietrzak, Muñoz Miquel). For the first time in two years, we are also publishing a piece in the Translator’s Corner, where Barbara McClintock discusses the controversial translation of the Civil Code of Québec.

Another area in which JoSTrans has visibly evolved is in the interviews it proposes. While mainly for technical reasons, the first interviews were kept short, feedback from viewers and readers suggested that more in-depth programmes were of interest to many, and particularly for academic and training purposes. This was the case for instance with Tim Cooper’s video on terminology made available last January, a rounded introduction to the discipline which seems to be both popular with distance-learning courses and in the classroom. In this issue, the interview of Jean-François Cornu uses a similar format to give in-depth insights into technical, cultural and historical developments of screen translation in France.

As ever, this issue is the product of the cooperation of many specialists and professionals, inside the JoSTrans team and within a wider Translation Studies community which is growing but seems to keep its collaborative spirit. As this varied issue comes to you, we hope that this sense of collaboration will be tangible across the journal’s pages and images.

Lucile Desblache