Introducing Translation Studies

Translation monographs and journals have continued to be published at a dizzying rate in the last year. Coinciding with the appearance of Introducing Translation Studies was Basil Hatim's Teaching and Researching Translation (Longman 2001), another volume which brings together the practice and theory of translation and is a useful work for translator trainees, trainers and researchers.

There have also been a string of publications focussing on computers and translation. Some of these cover machine translation or other computer-assisted translation tools: Austermuhl (2001), Mani (2001) and O'Hagan and Ashworth (2002), for instance. Mani's work on automatic summarization underlines the growing influence of translation practices in major organizations. This has also been the subject of a monograph by Emma Wagner (Translating for the European Union, St Jerome 2001) and a special issue of the journal Studies in Translatology (vol. 9.4, 2001) entitled Language Work and the European Union.

Electronic corpora continue to rise in importance in translation studies. Sara Laviosa's Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Rodopi 2002) is a useful survey of the ever-expanding field in which Dorothy Kenny's Lexis and Creativity in Translation has already made an important impact. Corpora have already been the subject of panels at the European Society for Translation Studies conference in Copenhagen 2001, with a special conference on corpora in translation studies lined up for Pretoria, South Africa, in July 2003.

Eugene Nida, a key figure in the history of translation studies, continues to be active. His Contexts in Translating appeared in October 2001. He analyses the influence of context on the phonological, lexical, grammatical and historical levels of the text. There has also been a recent second edition of Gentzler's Contemporary Translation Studies, with a third of edition of Bassnett's Translation Studies due in July 2002.

Finally, a number of works have recently been published in English on translation practices in Asia. One interesting example is Olivia Mok's paper 'Translational migration of martial arts fiction East and West' (Mok 2001), which analyses the translation of popular martial arts fiction in a range of countries. Adopting a polysystems approach, the paper shows how the practice has differed widely, producing hybrid texts in Thailand while stimulating a new autochtonous fiction form in Korea in the 1980s.

Jeremy Munday
University of Surrey
February 2001