Special Issue of MonTI-CTS SPRING-CLEANING: A CRITICAL REFLECTION
Editors: María Calzada Pérez and Sara Laviosa
This special issue is intended to be a self-reflexive research work that looks back and forward upon corpusbased translation studies (CTS). This is not the first time such an endeavour has been carried out. The reason is quite obvious. It is always healthy and productive to assess and re-assess the state-of-the-art before we put forward new (un)desirable premonitions. And, with corpus-based studies, the future and the past merge at an incredibly fast speed.
Similarly to other publications in the field (see, by way of example, Laviosa 1998; Laviosa 2002; Olohan 2004; Xiao 2010; Kruger et al. 2011), looking back brings us to, at least 1993, when Mona Baker officially envisaged a turning point in the history of the discipline:
I would like to argue that this turning point will come as a direct consequence of access to large corpora of both original and translated texts, and the development of specific methods and tools for interrogating such corpora in ways which are appropriate to the needs of translation scholars. (Baker 1993: 235)
Baker was not the first person to undertake corpus-based research (see, for example, (Gellerstam 1986; Lindquist 1989), but she was undoubtedly the scholar who most forcefully predicted what the future had in store. And her premonitions were realized in virtually no time. Already in 1998, there was enough corpusbased work for Sara Laviosa to put forward possibly the most well-known compilation on the subject in a special issue for Meta. Journal des traducteurs. By 2004, corpus-based studies was, in Baker’s (Baker 2004: 169) own words “too much rather than too little to go on”.
Indeed, research has grown exponentially from 1993 onwards, as all monographs testify, in the very aspects Baker had anticipated. Corpora became larger and larger; and then smaller and smaller (but more specialized). They are, as (Xiao & Yue 2009) show us, monolingual and multilingual; parallel, comparable, comparative; general and specialized; they adopt simple or complex configurations, as (Zanettin 2012) , reminds us when he talks about star- or diamond-shaped corpora. They are built upon multiple layers of parameters (cf. Laviosa 2012).
Methods (and theoretical results) have also proliferated and have meant “new ways of looking at translation” (Kenny in Laviosa 2011: 13) . Drawing on Partington, Duguid, & Taylor (2013: 13) , these new perspectives can be said to derive from different forms of comparison. Thus, simple comparisons entail the analysis of two different subcorpora (like when Moropa 2011 studies a set of texts in English vis-à-vis their Xhosa translations); serial comparisons involve the contrastive analysis of corpus A and corpus B, and then corpus A and corpus C, and so on (like when, for instance, Bosseaux 2006 examines Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and two of its translations into French). Multiple comparisons occur when corpus A is set against a pool of subcorpora at once. Partington et al. (2013: 13) explain that “those studies which employ the BNC [British National Corpus] or the Bank of English [BoE] as a background or reference corpus are of this multiple-comparison type” (for example, when Kenny 2001 double-checks her GEPCOLT results against the BNC, she is performing multiple comparisons). Diachronic comparisons involve the exploration of translation-related corpus throughout time and are still, admittedly, rare (Calzada Perez 2017; Calzada Pérez 2018) however, does precisely this with her European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive, ENPC). All these comparative methods have been put at the service of notably descriptive and applied translation studies. The aim was to unveil regularities of various kinds (as Zanettin 2012, most aptly exemplifies): of translation, of translators, of languages, of learning behaviour, of interpreting protocols.
Corpus tools have also beed devised at a frantic speed. There are all kinds of programs for each of the stages of compilation: web crawlers (some of which specialized in corpus building such as BootCaT), editing suites for a wide variety of formats (from txt raw corpora to xml marked up and annotated corpora); parsers, taggers and annotators (such as CLAWS, Tree Tagger, FreeLing; USAS); Corpus Management systems of very different types (like IMS Open Corpus Workbench, MODNLP; CQPWeb, SketchEngine; WMatrix); Concordancers (like AntConc, WordSmith Tools, TCA2, Glossa). There are also a wide variety of plugins generating all kinds of information for analysis: statistics, word lists, keyword lists, concordances, collocates, word clouds, word profiles, tree graphs.
With such an exponential growth, some predictions have been fulfilled, others have been abandoned. Hence, we believe it is time we pause and reflect (critically) upon our research domain. And we want to do so in what we see is a relatively innovative way: by importing Taylor and Marchi 's (2018) spirit from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) into CTS. Like them, we want to place our emphasis precisely on the faulty areas within our studies. We believe that, rather than hiding them under the carpet, we can learn valuable lessons from them. Thus, we aim to deal with the issues we have left undone; or those we have neglected. In short, and drawing on Taylor and Marchi’s (2008) work, we propose to devote this volume to revisiting our own partiality and cleaning some of our dustiest corners.
Regarding partiality, Taylor and Marchi (2018: 8) argue that
Understandably, most people just get on with the task of doing their research rather than discussing what didn’t work and how they balanced it. However, this then means that any new comers to the area, or colleagues starting out on a new project, have to reinvent those checks and balances anew each time.
Going back to our previous research, identifying some of its pitfalls, and having another goal at what did not work is a second chance we believe we deserve. Looking at objects of study from various viewpoints (out of new personal projects or joined efforts) may bring about a polyhedric multiplicity that we think will add up to what we already know. Plunging into (relatively) new practices, such as triangulation (see Malamatidou 2017), from our CTS springboard, may be one of the ways in which we can now contribute to going back to post-modernity; and do things differently.
As to dusty corners (“both the neglected aspects of analysis and under-researched topics and text types” (Taylor and Marchi, 2018: 9), we share many of those presented by Taylor and Marchi at the Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies Conference in 2018. In this way, we need further methods to identify (translated) absence; we could benefit from further protocols and tools to delve into similarities (as well as differences); we would do well to concentrate on voices that are still silent, non-dominant languages, non-named languages, multimodal texts, amongst many other concerns.
The present CFP, then, is interested in theoretical, descriptive, applied and critical papers (from CTS and external fields) that make a contribution to tackling CTS partiality and dusty spots of any kind. We particularly (but not only) welcome papers including:
• critical evaluation of one’s own work
• awareness of (old/new) research design issues
• use of new protocols and tools to examine corpora
• identification of areas where accountability is required and methods to guarantee accountability
• cases of triangulation of all kinds
• studies of absences in originals and/or translations
• studies of new voices, minoritised (and non-named) languages, multimodal texts, etc.
• pro-active proposals to bring CTS forward
Practical information and deadlines
Please submit abstracts (in Catalan, English, Italian, and Spanish) of approximately 500 words, including relevant references (not included in the word count), to both calzada@uji.es and saralaviosa@gmail.com.
Abstract deadline: 1 November 2019
Acceptance of proposals: 1 January 2020
Submission of papers: 31 May 2020
Acceptance of papers: 15 September 2020
Submission of final versions of papers: 15 November 2020
Publication: December 2020
Guest editors:Anna Strowe (University of Manchester)Richard Mansell (University of Exeter)Helle V. Dam (Aarhus University)This special issue focuses on the normative expectations around translators, including norms around translator identity, as well as around hiring or selection processes and understandings of competence or expertise. By applying the concept of norms to the area of translators and translatorship, we hope to connect conversations about the multiple intersecting systems of values that underpin those norms, often silently, ranging from beliefs about education, language skill, and qualification, to understandings of professionalism, economics, and translation itself, while continuing to explore the dimensions and qualities of translator identity and presentation. The norms themselves are at the centre of the topic, along with the values from which they emerge and with which they engage, but as with investigation of other types of norms, they must be extrapolated from available forms of data, for example texts by and about translators, or trends in hiring or training.As scholarship in translation studies has broadened, first from linguistic approaches to cultural and sociological approaches, and then to a focus on the translator, we have increasingly come to understand that we must view translation as a socially-situated practice or set of practices, carried out by agents whose behaviour and choices are influenced by a variety of external as well as internal factors. A large part of the focus has been on using this perspective to better understand the choices that are made in translating – that is, the specific textual decisions made by translators – but interest has also grown significantly in questions that move beyond textual choices and comparative textual analysis. There are significant threads of scholarship for example on the cultural or structural aspects of non-professional translation and interpreting (e.g. Antonini et al. 2017; Pérez-González and Susam-Saraeva 2012), the relationships between translation and activism (e.g. Boéri 2024; Gould and Tahmasebian 2020; Tymoczko 2010), and the impact of emerging technologies and digital spaces on perceptions of translatorship (e.g. Zhang et al. 2024), among many others.Norms have long been a productive tool for translation studies, but existing articulations and uses have focused on the translational norms that we understand as governing micro- and macro-level translation choices. Meylaerts (2008) discusses individual translators and their identities and profiles in relation to the norms of translation and the profession, following Simeoni (1998) in connecting these to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. However, behaviour around translator identities and characteristics, such as hiring or self-presentation, can also be examined in terms of norms. In a recent article, Strowe (2024) suggests considering translator selection as norm-driven could help us better recognize the values and decisions around translator recruitment and deconstruct assumptions around translator choice and identity.These norms are reflected in patterns in hiring trends, the translation industry, job advertisements, and translators’ websites or blogs, for example, but they also inform a variety of aspects of how translatorship is constructed. The self-image and presentation or representation of translators is informed by beliefs about what responsibilities, tasks, and capacities are involved in being a translator, areas that intersect both with culturally constructed notions of what constitutes and delimits translation itself (see Tymoczko 2007) and with what forms of social, cultural, and legal understandings we have about various agents’ forms of responsibility for texts (see Bantinaki 2020; Pym 2011).The special issue will collect both empirical studies that explore areas related to translator norms, and articles exploring either the theorization of translator norms or the methodological possibilities of this kind of work. Potential questions to explore include (but are not limited to) the following:How might we theorize norms around translator identity, self-presentation, hiring etc.?What kinds of translator norms can be identified within the LSP industry or in other contexts in which translation is done?What differences are there in translator norms across different contexts or domains, and how do these differences affect practices of translation?How can we understand projections of translator image as a form of representation of translator norm? • How are translator norms changing in the face of developments in digital technology?What kinds of research methods facilitate the exploration of translator norms?This is an open call, and the editors particularly welcome proposals from researchers whose workintersects with translator identity or self-presentation;looks at industry expectations around translators and hiring practices;seeks to describe and delimit the spaces of human agency and identity around translation amidst the growing presence of AI.Submission Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted by November 24 to Anna Strowe by email (anna.strowe@manchester.ac.uk). Once invited to do so by the editors, selected authors will be asked to submit an article of between 7000 and 8000 words, including references, through the journal’s online portal no later than May 30, 2026.A full schedule of dates plus the bibliography is available here: https://benjamins.com/series/ts/callforpapers.pdf
Life Writing and Translation Thursday 18 – Friday 19 June 2026 University of Geneva Abstract of no more than 250 words (bibliography excluded) in English or French are now invited and should be submitted to lifewritingtranslation@unige.ch by 16 November 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be distributed at the beginning of February 2026. Please find more information on abstracts on the Conference website: https://www.humanmovement.cam.ac.uk/events/translating-conflict-and-refuge-language-displacement-and-politics-representation
APTIS25 Online Conference at the UCL Centre for Translation Studies (3–4 November 2025) “Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?” The UCL Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) is looking forward to hosting the APTIS25 online conference. The APTIS25 conference (“Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?”) will take place on 3–4 November 2025 via Zoom Webinar. We encourage submissions from both academic and industry speakers. Please see our Call for Contributions as well as the Types of Contributions section to know more about the contributions that APTIS25 will be welcoming. If you would like to contribute to APTIS25 by presenting a talk or a roundtable, please visit the Submit a Proposal section, where you will find the link to send your abstract. Please kindly refer to the Key Dates to know more about submission and registration deadlines. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/aptis25ucl
APTIS25 Online Conference at the UCL Centre for Translation Studies (3–4 November 2025)“Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?”The UCL Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) is looking forward to hosting the APTIS25 online conference. The APTIS25 conference (“Better together: how can industry and academia collaborate to empower future language professionals?”) will take place on 3–4 November 2025 via Zoom Webinar.We encourage submissions from both academic and industry speakers. Please see our Call for Contributions as well as the Types of Contributions section to know more about the contributions that APTIS25 will be welcoming. If you would like to contribute to APTIS25 by presenting a talk or a roundtable, please visit the Submit a Proposal section, where you will find the link to send your abstract.Please kindly refer to the Key Dates to know more about submission and registration deadlines.https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/aptis25ucl
Hieronymus is the first Croatian journal dedicated exclusively to publishing research and professional articles in the field of translation studies and terminology. The journal has the following key goals: (1) to promote translation studies and terminology in Croatia and the broader region, where these two disciplines are not always recognized; and (2) to enhance local researchers’ visibility in the international translation studies community. For the Research Section of the journal, we welcome empirical studies with clear goals and well-defined methodology in any area of translation studies or terminology. In addition, papers presenting and discussing any area of professional translation or terminological practice are invited for the Professional section. Contributions by early career researchers (pre-Ph.D. or recently obtaining a Ph.D.) as well as young professionals are gladly accepted. In both sections of the journal, contributors from Croatia and the broader region are particularly welcome, in line with the journal’s mission outlined above. The preferred languages are English and Croatian. We accept submissions throughout the year, but for consideration in issue 12 (to be published in December 2025), submissions need to be sent by 30 March 2025 at the latest. Submissions will first be considered by the Editorial Team and, if they pass this initial screening, they will be forwarded for a double-blind peer review. Authors whose papers are accepted for publication must certify that their work has not been previously published. All papers are published in Open Access under the Creative Commons 4.0 open license. For information on citation style and formatting, please consult our Contributors page and Submission Guidelines. Please send your contributions to the following addresses: knikoli@ffzg.unizg.hr sveselic@ffzg.unizg.hr If you have any queries regarding this call, please do not hesitate to contact us
