This non-thematic issue has been prepared in the unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic which has affected the academia all around the world and made us move to distance teaching, assessment and research. I wish to thank our contributors for high-quality work and our JoSTras team for their dedication and unfailing support despite adverse circumstances.

We have received as many as 47 submissions for the July 2020 issue of JoSTrans and, after a rigorous peer review process, we selected nine papers for publication. They were grouped into three thematic sections spanning various subfields of Translation and Interpreting Studies: (1) Spotlight on research methods; (2) Interpreting and sight translation, and (3) Technologies and accessibility.

It is particularly pleasing to see a growing number of contributions which explore methodological aspects of research into specialised translation. The methodological section comprises three papers: by Chuan Yu on a researcher’s identities in digital ethnography, by Erik Angelone on screen recording as a diagnostic protocol to improve consistency in process-oriented assessment, and by Feng Pan, Kyung Hye Kim and Tao Li on a combination of parallel corpus methods with critical discourse analysis to investigate political translation.

The interpreting section features Randi Havnen’s paper on how a change of mode in sight translation affects meaning-making, Sijia Chen’s study into the impact of directionality on consecutive interpreting, and Xiangyu Wang and Xiangdong Li’s survey of Chinese job ads for in-house interpreters.

The last section focuses, not surprisingly, on our popular topic of technologies and accessibility. Rudy Loock applies corpus methods to identify machine-translationese to empower novice translators, Irene Tor-Carroggio carries out a reception study on audio description in China while Estella Oncins and Pilar Orero present an integrated approach to accessibility services.

Last but not least, we have nine book reviews and an interview with Carol Robertson on the early days of subtitling at the BBC, conducted by Lindsay Bywood.

For more information, click here

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse and ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts.

As the first extended collection to offer perspectives on translation and activism from a global perspective, this handbook includes case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised people from over twenty different languages. The contributions will make visible the role of translation in promoting and enabling social change, in promoting equality, in fighting discrimination, in supporting human rights, and in challenging autocracy and injustice across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, the US and Europe.

With a substantial introduction, thirty-one chapters, and an extensive bibliography, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all activists, translators, students and researchers of translation and activism within translation and interpreting studies.

Guest editors: Jeffrey Killman and Christopher D. Mellinger, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The ubiquity of technology and its often-touted benefits are sources of potential friction in legal and regulatory environments where translation and interpreting activities are carried out. Concerns have surrounded its ability to influence, constrain, or alter the implementation and quality of T&I work, thereby resulting in somewhat slower adoption rates in the field. Yet despite technological advances, this trepidation may persist, given the ever-expanding range of technologies at the disposal of legal parties and translators and interpreters who enable plurilingual encounters. Additionally, socioeconomic and policy factors complicate what is currently possible, with increasing attention paid to not only which tools are used, but how, when, and why.

It is now more important than ever to investigate the impact that these technologies have in legal translation and interpreting contexts across a range of variables, including productivity and quality metrics, ergonomic and physiological measures, as well as other indicators related to language access and rights, language policy, technology adoption and use, and more. Here, we broadly consider technologies that not only have been developed specifically to aid translation and interpreting professionals (such as machine translation, translator workbenches, glossary/terminology management tools, remote interpreting platforms) but also tools that have been adapted for use in these specific contexts (such as video conferencing or telephonic technologies, tablet computers, document and data repositories, audio equipment, corpora). The performance of the technologies can and should also be the subject of investigation, to understand how they are used by legal translators and interpreters, how they might be improved, or how their implementation might differ depending on contextual variables of their use. These performance indicators are of particular importance with respect to less-resourced and minority languages, since these languages are often counted among those within the long-tail of localization and have been secondary to development efforts, while simultaneously representing an area of increasing need to facilitate language access. Conversely, more still needs to be known about how the use of technologies in legal contexts affects the communicative environment in which they are employed, including the influence on how and to what extent various parties interact and where and when multilingual communication is possible with certain technologies. Even the means by which technologies are evaluated within legal and regulatory areas require critical reflection and study, not only in relation to majoritarian languages, but also when working with less-resourced languages and their intersection with language policy and planning.

This special issue seeks to bring together a broad range of studies related to the use of technologies in legal translation and interpreting domains. Such a topic has received limited treatment to date and is relevant in a wide variety of legal domains such as legal institutions, law enforcement, corrections, private law practice, immigration, asylum, or quasi-legal settings that occur in any sector that interacts with the law, such as social services or education.

For this special issue of Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, we welcome contributions from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including but not limited to, translation and interpreting studies, applied linguistics, information and communication technologies, legal studies, and technology studies. The issue comprises both theoretical and data-driven empirical work, or a combination thereof. While by no means exhaustive, the list of topics below would be of particular interest:

• Impact of technologies on legal translation/interpreting quality for both majority and minority languages
  ·Influence of technologies on legal communication in multilingual contexts
  · Legal and regulatory frameworks that influence the use of technologies in legal T&I contexts, including language policy and language planning
  · Use and development of technologies for dfferent language pairs, including less-resourced languages
  · T&I technologies developed specifically for legal contexts
  · Big data and legal T&I technologies
  · Legal, economic, or ergonomic factors that influence technology adoption and use
  · Role of technology in affordance or impediments to language access and rights
  · Intersection of technology, language planning and policy, particularly as it relates to the documentation and development of less-resource languages in legal contexts
  · Standards development and implementation for technologies in legal environments
  · Legal T&I pedagogy and its intersection with technology
  · Technologies and transcription/translation practices
  · Historical development of technologies in unique legal T&I contexts

Deadline for abstracts: 1 January 2021

For more information, click here

Special Issue Editors

Enza De Francisci, University of Glasgow

Cristina Marinetti, Cardiff University

This special issue seeks to begin a discussion about the particular contexts, material conditions, and individuals that have enabled authors, texts, and performance traditions to travel through translation. Covering theatre, opera and song from a range of different languages and time periods, we aim to shed light on the contexts and networks of agents – actors, singers, singing/acting masters, censors, directors, critics, writers and translators – who have intervened in the circulation of translated texts in a range of performance cultures. While cross-cultural encounters and transnational exchanges have characterized theatre history from its inception, little attention has been paid to the agents mediating those encounters and to the multiple forms of translation they engendered. Engaging with the growing academic interest in theatre translation, this special issue aims to advance research by bringing this area into dialogue with broader discussions around world literature and the sociology of translation.

Abstracts are invited for articles exploring the translation of plays, opera and song in different time periods and performance cultures. Contributions are invited on any of the following topics (but other issues and questions are also very welcome):

• Exploring the labour of the theatre translator and its relationship to its objects, environment and collaborators;
• Celebrity capital and the rewriting of theatre texts: actors, directors, singing/acting masters as agents of translation;
• Direct and indirect censorship: the role of censors and institutional gatekeepers on the selection, rewriting and circulation of foreign drama and song;
• Uncovering theatre translation networks around the world, shedding light on how they have contributed to the process of theatre making across time;
• The economics of drama translation: copyright, performance rights, and their impact on the translator’s visibility/invisibility;
• Theatre archives as an alternative source of knowledge for translation researchSpecial Issue Editor(s)

Deadline for abstracts: 21 December 2020

For more information, click here

Guest editor: Aurelia Klimkiewicz

Translation is traditionally represented as a spatial movement between two locations—typically from abroad to home—and presupposes the direct transfer of meaning from one language to another. However, current translation practices are not necessarily limited to movement across space; they can also acquire a more dynamic role that shapes the space itself, both locally and globally, from face-to-face contact to networks of human and non-human actors. This is the idea behind the concept of space as a social construct. Since this concept was introduced by Henri Lefebvre in his 1974 article La production de l’espace, important societal changes have further complexified the perception and experience of space: new technologies and means of production, globalization, free market, mass migration, multiethnic societies, and even increases in leisure travel. Contrary to the nation-state logic that advocates some degree of acculturation or assimilation of the foreign, current translation practices participate in much more complex and dynamic re/configurations of space, including densification (immigration, the multilingualization of cities, tourism), extension (the rise of global markets and institutions), contraction (exile, emigration/immigration) and fragmentation (the formation of diasporas and heterogeneous audiences). This shift from the national to the transnational brings attention to the multiplicity of micro and macro contexts, professional settings, and even alternative patterns of collaboration located in “a ‘liminal space’ between the world of activism and the service economy” (Baker, 23), in which translation may play a vital role.

This issue of Tusaaji invites contributions on the developments in the practice of translation—emerging and/or alternative trajectories, patterns and paths—that challenge the notion of translation as “the Invisible Hand in the market of communication” (Cronin, 29). Questions relevant to these issues include: How do new translation initiatives take place? How do alternative translation projects or actions impact the profession and the translator’s self-regulation and self-perception? How do translators adapt to new professional environments and reflect on their own role and profession? In what circumstances may translators challenge the status quo? What strategies help translators deal with chaos, unpredictability, improvisation and failure? Are translators aware of the impact that their work may have on society and others? What are the new channels of knowledge production emerging from current translation contexts? Is the empowerment of translators in today’s world relevant or not?

Authors are not required to limit themselves to the above list of questions. We welcome papers on all topics discussing theoretical, professional and practical issues, such as:

• Translation and close vs distant reading
• Translation and global publishing houses
• Professional vs non-professional digital literary reception (discussion forums, etc.)
• Translators and nomadism
• Translation and tourism advertising 
• Collaborative forms of translation (professional and amateur)
• Translation and labour-management relations
• Volumes and speed of translation and their management 
• Translation and activism
• Norms of translation in micro and macro contexts 
• Factors that accelerate or delay translation production, distribution and/or reception
• Private translation initiatives
• Models of tracking, mapping and monitoring the translation activity
• Translators’ blogs, forums of discussion, etc. 

We invite papers in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, or any other language of the Americas that deal with this issue’s theme. Given Tusaaji’s hemispheric focus, papers discussing the experience of translation in the Americas from this perspective are welcome; however, this issue is not restricted geographically so submissions about all languages and regions will be considered.

In addition to scholarly articles, we also invite submissions of visual art and of translations in any genre, and from/into any of the languages of the journal.

Deadline: September 30, 2020.  Submissions can be sent to the guest editor, Aurelia Klimkiewicz, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with a copy to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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Baker, Mona (2013). “Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action.” Social Movement Studies, 12:1, 23-47.

Cronin, Michael (2017). “Translation and Post-National Identity in the Digital Age.” In Ivana Hostová (ed.) Identity and Translation Trouble, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.19-33.

For more information, click here

The research group Socio-Cognitive Translation Studies: Processes and Networks (socotrans) at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna is delighted to announce an International Conference on Field Research on Translation and Interpreting: Practices, Processes, Networks (FIRE-TI) to be held in Vienna from 18 to 20 February 2021.

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers who study translation and interpreting (T&I) practices, processes or networks in situ using a variety of different (inter)disciplinary approaches, e. g. from sociological, cognitive, anthropological or ergonomic perspectives. The primary objective thereby is to create a common reflection space for T&I field and workplace research where experts can share insights into the diversity and complexity of translation and interpreting practices. In doing so, the conference also seeks to bring to the fore those particular aspects that are hard to reconstruct through product analyses or in a laboratory setting.

Extended deadline for submissions: 13 September 2020

For more information, click here

Please note that this conference was originally due to take place 27-28 Nov. 2020 but had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

APTIS (the Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies, UK and Ireland) has entered the third year since its formation. After two successful conferences held in the UK (at Aston University in 2018 and Newcastle University in 2019), the conference series is coming to Ireland. Dublin City University will be proud to host the 3rd Annual Conference on 19-20 November 2021.

APTIS encourages research into all aspects of translation and interpreting and aims to improve the teaching and learning of these subjects at UK and Irish HE institutions. Previous conferences examined challenges and opportunities involved in the teaching and learning of translation and interpreting and looked to make connections between academic and non-academic settings for such efforts. The conference in Dublin will look to the future and ask scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders on these islands to come together to discuss evolving profiles of translation and interpreting training.

We invite proposals for papers, panels, and workshops that engage largely but not exclusively with what is yet to come in the world of translation and interpreting (T&I) training. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• T&I and technology now and in the future
• T&I and AI now and in the future
• Developments in AVT training
• Developments in localisation training
• The future of accessibility in T&I programmes
• T&I as a profession and as an academic discipline: latest advances/state of the art/future prospects
• Building a skills base in T&I (project management, content creation, programming)
• The importance of history to T&I training now and in the future
• T&I and the EU in the context of Brexit and the lifting of the Irish language derogation
• Translation and interpreting in the context of language learning
• Ergonomic issues in T&I training

Deadline for submissions: 22 April 2021

For more information, click here

7th Young Linguists’ Meeting in Poznan (YLMP 2021): 1st Call for Papers

7th Young Linguists' Meeting in Poznan (YLMP 2021) will take place on 23-25 April 2021 in Poznan, Poland. The conference will be organized by the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.
The leitmotif of YLMP2021 is: “Rethinking language and identity in the multilingual world”

We welcome submissions in the following areas:
• psycholinguistics
• neurolinguistics
• clinical linguistics
• cognitive linguistics
• sociolinguistics and discourse studies
• language teaching methodology
• translation studies
• experimental pragmatics
• experimental syntax
• phonology and phonetics

PLENARY SPEAKERS:
• Wouter Duyck (Ghent University)
• Katarzyna Jankowiak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
• Julien Perrez (University of Liège)
• Helen Sauntson (York St John University)

Deadline for submissions: 13 November 2020

For more information, click here

After the success of ICTIC 1 (Mendoza, Argentina) and ICTIC 2 (Germersheim, Germany), ICTIC is holding its third edition at the Forlì Campus of the Università di Bologna, Italy, from June 28 to 30, 2021.
In just two editions, ICTIC has become one of the most important venues for scholars working at the interface of translation, interpreting and cognition. This year, we also intend to expand the boundaries of our scientific community and to foster a dialogue with neighbouring research domains to make Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies truly interdisciplinary.
ICTIC 3 is organised by the Laboratory for Multilectal Mediated Communication & Cognition (MC2 Lab) of the Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione of the Università di Bologna and it is endorsed by the TREC network. 

Participants are invited to submit proposals addressing cognitive aspects from any theoretical and methodological perspective of topics such as (but not limited to) the following:

• accessibility
• child language brokering and unprofessional translation
• emerging professional profiles, including respeaking, transcreation and transediting
• emotions, empathy, perspective taking and theory of mind
• epistemology
• ergonomics and human-computer interaction
• expanding methods: big data, meta-analysis, replication
• interpreting (remote, dialogue, simultaneous, consecutive, etc.)
• machine translation, post-editing and revision
• machine translation literacy
• multilingualism and professional communication
• multimodality and oral/written hybrids
• natural language processing
• psycholinguistic constructs in CTIS
• reception of translated products by real readers/listeners
• sign language translation and interpreting
• training the translator and the interpreter
• translation (literary, technical, scientific, audiovisual, etc.)
• writing and intralingual translation.

Deadline for submission of panel proposals: 30 September 2020

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 January 2021 

For more information, click here

Translation is one of the foundational features of European culture. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that the continent finally saw attempts to write its own history from the point of view of translation, but the roots of translation historiography run deeper. French translation historian and theorist Antoine Berman (1942–1991) was among the first Francophone scholars who argued that translation history can help us better understand the histories of European culture, languages, and literature. Unfortunately, his early death did not allow him to demonstrate the fruitfulness of his ideas in actual research. This was also the case of Anton Popovič (1933–1984), the founder of Slovak translation studies. Popovič started developing his concept of translation history in the 1970s and in time came up with a broad understanding of translation history as the concrete histories of translation programs, conceptions, and methods. Since the late 1970s, the translation scholar Jean Delisle has become one of the most prominent voices in translation history methodology. He has penned and edited several “portraits” of male and female translators as well as other histories of translation. Dirk Delabastita, Lieven D’hulst, Michel Ballard, or Henri Meschonnic (see illustrative bibliography below) have also produced important opinions on translation history and historical case studies.
Translation historiography has since become one of the most prevalent topics in translation studies worldwide. The interest is due to the still relevant sociological turn in translation studies and attempts to closely study the work of individual translators. Logically, such issues call for historical contextualization and explanation. The growing number of existing and pending research initiatives covering histories of translations into several world languages allows us to compare and confront various forms and means of translation in different cultural environments, influenced by different geopolitical factors and with different cultural and literary traditions. When looking at Slovak research in translation history (from the 1960s and the 1990s, synthesized between 2013 and 2017, and still in progress) and current Western European research, we see much common ground and many similarities in significant phenomena. This leads us to question the clear-cut models of center-periphery relations in European culture.
Reading various national translation histories in a comparative manner also reminds us that external factors have always affected literature, regardless of political regimes. This issue of World Literature Studies on translation history aims to bring together views from different sociocultural environments and historical backgrounds in order to shed light on the tasks of translators and the methods they employed throughout history.

Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2020

For more information, click here