Guest Editors: Jinsil CHOI, Jonathan EVANS and Kyung Hye KIM
This special issue will investigate the role of translation in the rapidly changing and developing environment of global media streaming. While there have been calls to ‘recenter globalization’ since the early 2000s (e.g. Iwabuchi 2002), since the late 2000s the development of streaming media has effectively disrupted older linear flow patterns of film and media distribution and consumption. There is now globally more access in translation to what had been marginalised cultures in the global media ecology, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Nigeria. In turn, these so-called marginalised cultures in the global media ecology, which had been previously largely dominated by Hollywood, now enjoy wider access in translation to media cultures which had been much less explored or ignored in their home cultures: Korean audiences having a greater access to Danish, German, and Spanish media, for instance. Streaming service platforms turned content creators such as Amazon, Netflix and Rakuten Viki are in the process of overturning previous understandings of the global mediasphere and accelerating the dynamics of the media landscape, enabling contraflow of media content and de/recentering understandings of global media production. Increasingly invested in international services, streaming companies’ practices fragment, deconstruct and reconfigure media space.
Video streaming sites such as Youtube, where original content is also distributed, contribute to this refashioning of media distribution and reception and further complicate the relationship between translator, content provider and creator. Yet the process is not limited to disruptive new companies: established multinational media and technology companies such as Disney and Apple have recently launched new streaming services, suggesting that the field is in a constant process of reconfiguration as different agents emerge, rise to power or struggle to hold market share. The effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has yet to be fully understood, but streaming has been a significant part of people’s media consumption during lockdown, and is expected to precipitate pronounced reconfiguration of the contemporary global media ecosystem. While there is a growing body of work on streaming from media studies (Dixon 2013; Smith and Telang 2016; Johnson 2018; Lobato 2019; Pallister 2019), there has been considerably less research on the relationship between translation and streaming (with the exceptions of Dwyer 2017; Pedersen 2018).
Translation is central to these recent disruptions of the media field, as streaming providers offer most media content in translated versions, be it dubbed or subtitled, propelling the cultural mobility of media content across national and linguistic borders. Netflix, for example, functions as a particularly disruptive force by offering an ever wider range of genres and non-English language series tailored to specific groups of people around the world (Barker and Wiatrowski 2017), to the extent that it supported more than 20 languages by 2017 and approached “an inflection point where English won’t be the primary viewing experience on Netflix” (Netflix 2017). Not all translations on streaming platforms are official, and there continue to be thriving fan translation cultures on streaming platforms such as Youtube and Viki which offer access to media between what Casanova (1999) calls ‘dominated’ cultures, as well as between ‘dominating’ and ‘dominated’ cultures. This increasing fluidity is having a significant effect on Anglosphere understandings of world media, which had previously seen ‘foreign’ film and TV as elite, highbrow productions but now, especially through streaming platforms and fansubbing, more popular media such as Korean soap operas or Chinese teenage TV dramas are becoming widely available. As such, Eurocentric notions of popular media (Shohat and Stam 1994) need rethinking to take into account the increasing circulation of media products from around the world and the shifting balances of soft power (Nye 2004) related to the streaming of media content. How, for instance, does access to Chinese soap operas in translation affect the image of China in the world and its soft power? How does streaming invert and alter previous hierarchies? At the same time, the massive abundance of available media around the globe is creating a scarcity of attention and affecting a new attention ecology (Citton 2017) which risks ‘dominated’ languages and cultures being overlooked in the sheer quantity of ‘dominating’ language production. How then do streaming and translation filter media for consumers? Are streaming services and video sites reinforcing, or challenging, existing inequalities of access and distribution through curation and selection of languages to translate into? What effect is this having on the dominance of ‘global’ English? Importantly, how does the curation of media content through translation and streaming promote or silence communities such as the LGBT community, the Deaf or ethnic minorities? It is not a given that access to media from many different nations will be representative of the diversity within those nations. How do notions of alterity change in globalised media?
The topic of translation and streaming, then, has significant relationships not only with language and contemporary media consumption, but also soft power and global understandings of alterity. This special issue aims to explore the role of translation in the streaming epoch, especially in relation to the shifting definition of ‘peripheral/dominated’ and ‘central/dominating’ media producing cultures. We welcome contributions critically addressing translation (understood broadly) in the global media environment that has been created in relation to streaming and on demand services. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Video streaming giants (e.g. Netflix, Amazon) and translation
• Transnational and translational co-productions for international streaming
• Shifting notions of centre/dominant and periphery/dominated and ways of retheorising the position of cultures in the current media ecology
• Streaming, translation and the asymmetrical media environment
• Minoritised groups in translation and streaming media
• Translation as a form of curation of media
• Economies of attention, digital distribution and translation
• Shadow economies of media translation and their effects on global circulation
• South-South or other ‘dominated-dominated’ translation practices (i.e. that do not pass through ‘dominant’ languages) for popular media
Please send any queries to the special issue editors, Jinsil CHOI (diane45@kmu.ac.kr), Jonathan EVANS (jonathan.e.evans@glasgow.ac.uk) and Kyung Hye KIM (kyunghye.kim@sjtu.edu.cn). The deadline for abstracts (400-500 words) is 1 February 2021, to be submitted to the special issue editors.
Submission of abstracts: 1 February 2021
For more information, click here
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
