Calls for papers

  Mean Machines? Technological (R)evolution and Human Labour in the Translation and Interpreting Industry The translation sector has become a prototypical case for the revolutionary force of digitalisation. The outsourcing of translation processes from humans to machines, combined with easy and free access to translation services via digital tools, is radically changing the entire field of transcultural communication. This special issue focuses on technology-induced transformations that can be observed on a variety of levels in the translation and interpreting landscape. On an industry level, the value ascribed to professional human translation is in decline, as machine translation (MT) is becoming increasingly efficient (Carmo 2020). This leads to economic reverberations for human translators who struggle to negotiate adequate rates for their assignments (Vieira 2020). It is evident that the machinisation of translation results in growing economic pressure for professional human translators. The digital transformation in the field of translation also triggers a debate on the level of theory and ethics. This includes a discussion on the status and purpose of translation in an increasingly globalised and digitalised world (Cronin 2012). MT can be described as a means of low-threshold access to translation, in a sense liberalising translation for broad segments of the population (cf. O’Thomas 2017: 285). At the same time, the large-scale deployment of MT through multinational corporations offers ample potential for a critique of technocapitalist practices (cf. Baumgarten/Cornellà-Detrell 2018) and raises questions of ownership and participation in technology development (Bijker/ Hughes/Pinch 2012). This special issue invites contributions that focus on the effects of the machinisation and digitalisation of translation and interpreting on the levels of labour, industry, theory and ethics. The special issue will discuss how our views on translation as a product, a process, a business sector and as a social practice are subject to steady and gradual transformations, with transcultural communication progressively sliding into the realm of machines. We particularly welcome contributions with a critical, interdisciplinary and daring theoretical outlook. Contributions may be submitted from a wide array of investigative lines, not limited to the ones mentioned above, and may be inspired by one or more of the following questions: How are the working conditions and job profiles of professional translators transformed in the face of digitalisation? How does the value of translation change as it increasingly becomes a post-human task? Against what background can the value of translation be measured? What is the role of Translation Studies in the investigation of translation technology, considering the discipline’s history and genetics? How can theories and heuristics from Science and Technology Studies, such as Social Construction of Technology (Bijker/Hughes/Pinch 2012), contribute to a more holistic view of translation technology and, especially, machine translation? In what way can the hegemony of technology corporations in the development and deployment of MT systems be described as a technocapitalist practice? Do we need to incorporate a critical theory of technology (cf. Feenberg 2002) in translation studies as a basis for a comprehensive investigative approach to translation technology? How can translation technology be assessed against the background of ecology and climate change, considering its use of resources through energy-intensive data centres (cf. Cronin 2019)? To contribute to this special issue, please submit a short paper proposal (500 words, excluding references) to both guest editors:   Michael Tieber, michael.tieber@uni-graz.at Stefan Baumgarten, stefan.baumgarten@uni-graz.at                          Publication schedule Deadline for paper proposals 15 April 2022 Notification on paper proposals 30 April 2022 Submission of full papers 31 October 2022 Notification on peer review outcome 31 March 2023 Revised versions 30 June 2023 Final manuscripts 30 September 2023 Tentative publication date Winter 2023   References Baumgarten, Stefan/Cornellà-Detrell, Jordi (2018) “Translation and the economies of power”, in: Baumgarten, Stefan/Cornellà-Detrell (eds.) Translation and the global spaces of power. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 11-26.   Bijker, Wiebe E./Hughes, Thomas P./Pinch, Trevor J. (eds.) (2012/1987) The social construction of  technological systems. New directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.   Carmo, Felix do (2020) “‘Time is money’ and the value of translation”, in: Translation Spaces 9 (1), 35-57.   Cronin, Michael (2012) Translation in the digital age. London/New York: Routledge (New perspectives in translation studies).   Cronin, Michael (2019) “Translation, technology and climate change”, in: O’Hagan, Minako (ed.) The  Routledge handbook of translation and technology. London/New York: Routledge, 516-530.   Feenberg, Andrew (2002) Transforming technology: a critical theory revisited. Oxford: OUP.   O’Thomas, Mark (2017) “Humanum ex machina. Translation in the post-global, posthuman world”, in: Target 29 (2), 284-300.   Vieira, Lucas N. (2020) “Automation anxiety and translators”, in: Translation Studies 13 (1), 1-21.

The past decade has seen a substantial rise in research publications focused more and more on the issue of translation tasks and projects having to tackle with texts that are not limited to a single language, dialect, or sociolect (Beseghi 2017, Ranzato and Zanotti 2018, Pérez and de Higes 2019, Rebane and Junkerjürgen 2019, to mention but a few). In other words, they display, and play with, the inclusion of words or phrases that do not belong to the standard language norm of the main language the text is composed in. The decade(s) before that required that such studies be introduced by a justification of the importance or relevance of language variation within texts (e.g., Sternberg 1981, Delabastita and Grutman 2005, Bleichenbacher 2008, Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011). This is no longer necessary nor is it accurate to claim that there is a woeful lack of studies on this topic. So, the question now is how far have we come exactly in our progress towards including this kind of sensitivity in the mainstream of translation studies, both theoretically and in the applied domain of professional practice and academic training? How is (yet another) dichotomy—of foreign vs. non-foreign—called into question by multilingual phenomena, such as creoles and code-switching, which are not necessarily based on the same factors as national borders, especially if we take into account multilingual communities and co-official languages within a given country?  This Special Issue aims to address this question by accepting submissions that deal with it from different angles such as the ones suggested here but not limited to them: Are translators proficient in all the languages of a multilingual fictional text (e.g., a novel or television series), and do they need to be? How is multilingualism in fiction an element of an author’s style and how is multilingualism dealt with accordingly? What strategies are used by translators in rendering scripted multilingualism and how they are affected by the habitual strategies involved in translation practices? How have stereotypes (of character portrayal, conversational patterns or topics, or situations or events) developed and changed regarding the strategic use of foreign languages, dialects and non-native use of languages? What are the practices and trends of using and rendering invented languages (e.g., as spoken by aliens from other planets or fantasy worlds)? Are translations becoming more multilingual or linguistically diverse and, if so, by what means? What genres and text-types are more affected by multilingualism, more problematic or innovative in translation? In what aspects can / must we revise traditional theoretical approaches in the light of discoveries made in the area of multilingual translation? What about less traditional approaches, such as taking LGBTiQ+ studies/factors into account, or racial discourse, etc.? To what extent is lingua franca a factor, and directionality, as in the distinction between from English vs. into English, for instance, or between languages that are not widespread on a global level? Are there significant differences depending on whether the texts are written or audiovisual, i.e., mode and multimodality? What are the relations between translation, multilingualism, pseudotranslations, creoles, code-switching, slang, non-native speech and other manifestations of sociolinguistic variation? What historical periods can be meaningfully sketched both in the use of multilingualism in film, television, and video on demand, and the way they were and have been translated? What are the key characteristics of each period and the key factors of change from one period to another? How have the researchers’ interests in the field of translation studies been sparked, what is the focus of their research and how has it evolved? What other aspects of translation has multilingualism been related to? How is multilingualism tackled in machine translation, artificial intelligence, templates for translators, and post-editing practices? Deadline for submission of abstracts: 12 October 2022 For more information, click here 

The impact of AI on literary translation: assessing changes in translation theory, practice and creativity In early 2020, we discussed the possibility of organizing a TRACT seminar series on machine translation (MT) of literary texts. Since then, this topic has been the subject of an ever-increasing number of conferences, articles and monographs. It is probably the spectacular “progress” of MT tools now available to the general public — in particular DeepL and Google Translate, taking advantage of recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) — that has made it inevitable for the literary translation community to take this phenomenon into account.             Indeed, these tools, especially because of their ability to process an impressive quantity of texts almost instantaneously, reinforce the idea that translation, i.e. going from one language to another, is quite a straightforward operation, the manifestation of a one-to-one relationship between two languages. This reflects a simplistic conception of language, seen as a code, which translators would simply have to decode and then re-encode, following transformation rules or algorithms.             And this is precisely how the first translation machines were imagined and designed, before being supplanted by statistical translation, and then by so-called “neural” machine translation. However, the blatant failure of the first attempts at machine translation led to the total and brutal suppression of the budget allocated to this research in 1966 in the United States following the conclusions of the ALPAC report. On the other hand, the still perceptible imperfections of MT, based only on the statistical processing of huge parallel corpora, never seemed likely to call into question the role of human translators (otherwise called “bio-translators”). Until recently, only specialized or pragmatic translators often resorted to computer-assisted translation or CAT. However, with the rapid advent of CAT, even literary translators fear that their autonomy, their authorial status, their agency might be threatened. The creative dimension of their work, which translators have been claiming for so many years, is at risk of being forgotten and replaced by the ancillary activity of post-editing. Man at the service of the machine, so to speak.             It is easy to see what advantages unscrupulous publishers could gain from this new situation. This is particularly true for so-called “genre literature” (fantasy, romance, sci-fi, etc.) that tends to follow repetitive and set patterns. The neural machine translation of fantasy or romance books, for example, would save a lot of time and therefore money, which would certainly change the practices of the publishing world.             Faced with this situation, it seems that literary translation practitioners and theorists can no longer remain on the sidelines. “L’observatoire de la traduction automatique” [The Machine Translation Study Centre] set up in 2019 by ATLAS, the Association for the Promotion of Literary Translation, is a concrete example of this in France. It is not a question of adopting a defensive position, but of taking full account of the paradigm shift in translation that the emergence of NMT implies. In any case, it will not disappear and is even likely, according to some A.I. specialists, to make progress that could, in the long run, supplant bio-translators.             That is why, beyond the fears aroused by NMT among translation professionals, and beyond the criticism of the quality of the translations it produces, we wish to question the shifts that NMT induces in our ways of considering translation. In other words, what NMT does to the concept of translation and, consequently, to translation theory — how our experience of translation, modified by the presence of the machine, necessarily affects the way we think about translation. Is the machine capable of capturing the singularity of an author's style, of what the author does with and to language? Can NMT find a strategy capable of restoring the complexity of the translation process, in one way or another? This leads us to a renewed questioning of what it means to “understand” a text, and more generally to “read” a text, especially if we consider with G. Steiner that “to understand is to translate”. Can we say that the machine reads the text in order to translate it the way the bio-translator does? Translating implies the implementation of an extremely refined form of thought. And this brings us back to the question posed by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), back in 1950: "Can machines think?”            How does the human translator understand the source text? Is reading the text to be translated different from reading for pleasure? How does the translator arrive at the target text, through hesitations, backtracking, dictionary consultations, etc.? Can research on the cognitive processes at work in human translators shed useful light on these questions? Our seminar proposes to investigate the topic in three directions (which necessarily intersect at certain points): We would like to introduce literary translators, Translation Studies specialists, researchers, students to the new tools coming from AI, CAT, NMT, enlightening them on how they work, the role of computational linguistics, cognitive science, neurosciences, their history, the perspectives of progress, their limits etc. How does NMT measure up to literary texts; what challenges does literature — especially poetry — with its equivocation, ambiguities, enigmatic meanings, points of untranslatability pose to NMT? Conversely, what part can NMT, CAT tools, play in the renewal of literary creativity? Does NMT effect a paradigm shift for translation? To what extent do omnipresent machines allow us to gain awareness of the fact that certain processes that used to be performed by expert translations only have now become automatic? What is the place of bio-translators? Do they become liberated or alienated by the machine (which cannot function without human-produced data)? In what way can the translators' lived experience of these changes help to map out a new paradigm, which includes but also exceeds the pragmatic dimension of this work? As part of the above, the following questions might be addressed: Could the new MT tools really replace human translators in the long run? Consequences of and new directions in teaching translation at universities in the age of NLP Can corpus translatology or CAT improve the quality of literary translations or retranslations? To what extent are the practices of pragmatic translators transferable to literary translators? Does the machine make the bio-translator an augmented or a diminished translator? What role for the machine, what role for the human? How do NNT and CAT change the translator's relationship to the literary text, his or her reading of the text, and thus his or her engagement with the text? Human/machine interaction in literary translation: is collaboration possible, desirable, or harmful? Aren't literary translators in danger of being strongly encouraged by publishers to become specialized editors (development of post-editing)? Won't the machine reduce them to an ancillary function that they have been trying to free themselves from for decades? Can't the machine become the ally of literary creativity, through the randomness it introduces into the translation, or through the formal constraints that can be instilled in it (rhymes and feet in the translation of poetry, for example)? Isn't genre literature, which often responds to fairly formatted forms of writing (fantasy, romance, etc.) an ideal target for the development of NMT in the literary field? What happens to the “translation project" — dear to Antoine Berman — if we entrust the text to a machine? Does corpus stylistics allow us better to study and compare the translation strategies implemented by human translators? Is it relevant for comparing machine translation and bio-translation? Does readers’ reception of literary texts differ depending on the modalities of their translation? Deadline for abstracts: 6 June 2022 For more information, click here

Editors:Kobus MaraisReine MeylaertsMaud Gonne 1. ConceptualizationSince the emergence of complexity thinking, scholars from the natural and social sciences as well as thehumanities are renewing efforts to construct a unified framework that would unite all scholarly activity.The work of Terrence Deacon (2013), at the interface of (at least) physics, chemistry, biology, neurology,cognitive science, semiotics, anthropology and philosophy, is a great, though not the only, example of thiskind of work. It is becoming clear that this paradigm of complex relational and process thinking means,among others, that the relationships between fields of study are more important than the differences betweenthem. Deacon’s contribution, for instance, lies not (only) in original findings in any of the fields in whichhe works but (also) in the ways in which he relates bodies of knowledge to one another. An example wouldbe his links between a theory of work (physics) and a theory of information (cybernetics) by means of atheory of meaning (semiotics).This line of thinking indeed situates semiotics and biosemiotics in the centre of the abovementioned debate(also see Hoffmeyer, 2008; Kauffman, 2012).In semiotics, Susan Petrilli’s (2003) thought-provoking collection covers a wide variety of chapters focusedon translation, which she conceptualizes as semiotic process. Her work made it possible to link biosemioticsand semiotics through the notion of “translation”, which is what we aim to explore further in this book.Michael Cronin’s work in translation studies links up with the above through his use of the notion of“ecology”. To apprehend interconnectedness and vulnerability in the age of the Anthropocene, his workchallenges text-oriented and linear approaches while engaging in eco-translational thinking. He callstradosphere all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates betweenliving and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed orunderstood by the receiving entity (Cronin, 2017, p. 71). The aptness of Cronin’s work on ecology finds apartner in that of Bruno Latour, whose development of a sociology of translation (2005) responds to theneed to reconnect the social and natural worlds and to account for the multiple connections that make whathe calls the ‘social’.In an effort further to work out the implications of this new way of thinking, Marais (2019, p. 120)conceptualized translation in terms of “negentropic semiotic work performed by the application ofconstraints on the semiotic process” (see also Kress 2013). Building on Peirce, namely that the meaning ofa sign is its translation into another sign, translation is defined as a process that entails semiotic work doneby constraining semiotic possibilities. This conceptualization allows for the study of all forms of meaningmaking, i.e. translation, under a single conceptual framework, but it also allows for a unified ecologicalview for both the sciences and the humanities. “The long standing distinction between the human and socialsciences and the natural and physical sciences is no longer tenable in a world where we cannot remainindifferent to the more than human” (Cronin, 2017, p. 3).These kind of approaches open ample possibilities for a dialogue between Translation Studies, Semioticsand Biosemiotics, exploring translation not only in linguistic and anthropocentric terms, but as a semioticprocess that can take place in and between all (living) organisms – human and non-human organic andinorganic, material and immaterial alike. Not only the translation of Hamlet into French, or of oral speechinto subtitles, but also communication between dolphins or between a dog and its master, or moving a statuefrom one place to another, or rewatching a film are translation processes. However, many of theimplications of this line of thinking still need to be explored, and if the references to Deacon, Petrilli andCronin holds, this should be done in an interdisciplinary way that tests, transgresses and transformsscholarly boundaries.Based on the conference that took place in August 2021, we call for papers for an edited volume in whichwe hope to draw together biosemioticians, semioticians and translation studies scholars to discuss theinterdisciplinary relations between these fields and the implications of these relations for the study of socialand cultural reality as emerging from both matter and mind. We invite colleagues who presented at theconference as well as those who did not to submit either theoretical or data-driven or mixed proposals,reflecting on the complexity of social-cultural emergence as a translation process. Some of the topics thatcolleagues could consider would be the following: • Is translation, as semiotic work and process, indeed able to link all of the biological world,including humans, with the non-living world in one ecology, and if so how?• What conceptual constructs in each of the three fields are relevant for the other fields, and how?• Could the fields learn methodological and epistemological lessons from one another? If so, whatwould these entail?• Could collaborative scholarship enhance an understanding of social-cultural emergence, and if so,what would this scholarship entail?• How, if at all, does entropy and negentropy play out differently in social-cultural systemscompared to biological and/or physical systems?• How does social-cultural emergence differ from biological and even physical emergence? Systemsthinking tends to ignore differences like the intentionality of biological agents in contrast tophysical agents. Thus, if one were to consider the possibility that intention has causal effect, howdoes one factor intention into thinking about complex adaptive systems? Please send abstracts of between 300 and 500 words to jmarais@ufs.ac.za Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 April 2022

JRHE, the Journal of Research in Higher Education published by Babeș-Bolyai University, the QUALITAS Centre, invites submissions for the forthcoming special issue on the research, pedagogy and practice of translation and interpretation, due out in September 2022. JRHE is a peer-reviewed, open access journal http://jrehe.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/, that seeks to address and factor in the major challenges educators, researchers, trainers and trainers of trainers in the field  are faced with in these accelerated global times. As well as the changing professional communication patterns and policies manifesting themselves at this juncture in pandemic times, the volume sets out to engage the transformative forces impacting these academic subjects and the global language industry in the age of digital literacies and remote teaching. Fostering transdisciplinarity and multilingualism at the highest professional level in the language industry par excellence, the Department of Applied Modern Languages at BBU – a pioneering department in the country, marking its 30th anniversary in Higher Education in Romania–  commissions state-of-the art contributions that cover the terrain of translation and interpretation studies. Submission topics may include, but are not limited to: Advanced technology applications in the pedagogies of CI and TS; Multimodality in T & I (audiovisuality, video-gaming, subtitling et al); Remote interpreting, I&T teaching and re-speaking; The cultural and ‘geo’ turn in translation studies; Posthumanities and translation and interpretation practice; Translation and interpretation and their territorial politics/policies Deadline for abstracts: 30 June 2022 For more information, click here

Paper abstracts should be submitted to Sophia Melanson Ricciardone (smelan1@yorku.ca) and Margherita Zanoletti (margherita.zanoletti@unicatt.it) by March 31, 2022. The submission should include: • Name/Affiliation/e-mail of participant(s), • Paper Title,• Abstract (200-250 words) • and Keywords (up to 5). Please kindly note that the deadline to receive abstracts is 31 March 2022. The call can also be accessed at https://www.semioticsworld.com/submissions/ We look forward to hearing from you and receiving your submission, and to meeting up at this exciting conference.Please feel free to share this call among your research colleagues. Best wishes, Panel ConvenorsSusan Petrilli, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy susan.petrilli@gmail.com Meng Ji, The University of Sydney, New South Wales christine.ji@sydney.edu.au Sophia Melanson-Ricciardone, York University, Toronto, Canada smelan1@yorku.caMargherita Zanoletti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy margherita.zanoletti@unicatt.it Emotions, Translation and Encountering the Other This panel invites participators to contribute with their reflections on the signs – verbal and nonverbal – of signifying, communicating and translating emotions in society today. In a global semiotic framework, we propose an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to the question of the translation/translatability of the languages of the emotions, whether a question of intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic translation. An ever more multicultural globalised world amplifies our understanding of the range, complexity and experience of human emotions, thus of their role in shaping knowledge, belief and values and in defining the politics of human behaviour and social practice. Understanding emotions of diverse peoples and communities represents an integral, increasingly important part of cultural literacy in our globalised world. Contributions are welcome from different fields and disciplines in dialogue – from the sign sciences to the life sciences –, as thematized by general semiotics on a theoretical level and developed by global semiotics on the practical. Contributions are welcome relating to such areas, among others, as Literary Studies and the Arts, The Task of Translators and Interpreters, Semiotics, Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, Gender Studies, Multiculturalism & Migration, Audio-Visual Design and Digital Culture, Media and Technology, Philosophy and History, Translation Training/Education, Legal studies and Ethics, Anthropology, sociology, psychology, Biosemiotics and the Health Sciences, Cognitive Sciences and Neurosemiotics. Keywords: translation, emotion, semiotic, human behaviour, social practice

The Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC) is pleased to announce that the CIUTI International Conference will take place for the first time in Lima and Latin America in 2022. CIUTI gathers a group of universities distinguished for their outstanding quality in research and translation and interpreting training. National and regional processes designed to ensure access to information and public services leverage translation and interpreting (T&I) to promote citizens' rights. The state’s fight against marginalization and poverty and promotion of fundamental rights is continually buffeted by constant tension between both able-bodied and disabled citizens, and their economic activities as these citizens seek access to information, public services, and equality in all its forms. Language services are fundamental to the promotion of human rights in all of these scenarios, even though these services can also be a potential source of inequality. Deadline for submissions: 26 March 2022 For more information, click here

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) invites everyone interested in machine translation and translation-related tools and resources ― developers, researchers, users, translation and localization professionals and managers ― to participate in this conference.Driven by the state of the art, the research community will demonstrate their cutting-edge research and results. Professional machine translation users will provide insight into successful MT implementation of machine translation (MT) in business scenarios as well as implementation scenarios involving large corporations, governments, or NGOs. Translation studies scholars and translation practitioners are also invited to share their first-hand MT experience, which will be addressed during a special track. Deadline for submissions: 25 March 2022 For more information, click here

The main aim of this hybrid Colloquium (in person and online) – which has shifted venue from edition to edition since 2016 – is to periodically offer an overview of the latest trends in the research on translation and gender around the world, with special emphasis on its cross-pollination with a number of disciplines, including but not limited to Translation Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, Sociology, Politics, Linguistics and Literary Criticism. Besides its overview of the growing diversity of research (both theoretical and practical) on translation and gender/sexuality/equality, the 5th edition of this Colloquium will have a thematic orientation focused on the role played by translation and interpreting as agents of resistance to and change of the dynamics between gender and power in society.   The alliance between feminism(s) and translation has fostered the development of studies centred around agency and performativity of the individual, the translator or the interpreter and their role in society. In the 21st century, both feminism(s) and translation have become privileged spaces of agency, activism and resistance, thus becoming central to the identification and analysis of the strategies of subordination used to exercise social, political and cultural power.   Starting from the work by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2017), we intend to develop further the notion of the translator/interpreter as activist, namely as champion of political change, advocate of gender equality, promoter of gender diversity, voice-giver and helper of minorities, migrants and refugees, and agent of change capable of putting “into words the perspectives and experiences of oppressed and silenced peoples”. Our reflection also follows in the footsteps of Olga Castro and Emek Ergun’s research on Feminist Translation Studies. Local and Transnational Perspectives (2017) in order to widen the discussion on the interplay between feminist translation, agency and activism as academic fields of enquiry.  The Colloquium aims at making visible the important role of interpreters and translators in: 1) promoting and enabling social, political and cultural change around the world; 2) promoting equality; 3) fighting discrimination; 4) supporting gender diversity; 5) supporting human rights; 6) empowering minorities; 7) challenging authority and injustice not only across European countries but all over the world; 8) facilitating network-building activities among activists and agents of change and 8) teaching feminist translation as a pedagogical act in support of social and gender equality.  We are aware that translation is a powerful tool capable of producing social, political and cultural transformation. Thus, the Colloquium wants to open a forum of discussion and reflection on the contribution offered by practitioners, stakeholders and scholars to the study of translation as activism and agent of change.   Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2022 For more information, click here

CfP conference: 13-15 July 2022. Performative & Experiential Translation: Meaning-Making through Language, Art and Media, King’s College, London. Deadline for proposals: 21 April 2022

CfP. Special issue: Translation in and from the Middle Ages. Special issue of Translation Matters 5.2 (Autumn 2023) Deadline for submissions: 31st October 2022

Special Issue in The Translator, edited by Cornelia Zwischenberger and Leandra Sitte Several relatively new forms of translation have emerged following the advent of the participatory Web 2.0. These include solicited forms of translation such as translation crowdsourcing used by for-profit companies like Facebook or Twitter. There are also other forms of translation like machine translation or self-translation occurring on social media platforms, especially on newer representatives like Instagram or TikTok (Desjardins 2019). Translation crowdsourcing is also employed by non-profit organizations like TED or Kiva. While these companies or organizations recruit voluntary and unpaid translators, there are also several translation platforms such as Gengo or Unbabel which employ paid translation crowdsourcing at below market rates (Jiménez-Crespo 2021). Furthermore, these relatively new forms of translation also include a wide range of unsolicited and self-managed types of translation such as interlingual knowledge-sharing through Wikipedia (Jones 2017, 2019; McDonough Dolmaya 2015, 2017) or Yeeyan (Yang 2020) as well as the various types of online fan translations such as fansubbing, fandubbing, scanlations or translation hacking (Fabbretti 2019; Lee 2009; Orrego-Carmona 2019; Muñoz Sánchez 2007, 2009). Even though these more recent phenomena and the communities involved in the translation process have caught the attention of Translation Studies scholars and have been studied from multiple perspectives, two lacunae have been identified by Zwischenberger (2021). Firstly, there is no consensus as to what constitutes the most appropriate top-level concept for these translation phenomena. Several candidates are currently being used concomitantly, including online collaborative translation, voluntary translation, user-generated translation (UGT), and social online translation, to name but a few. Secondly, research into the ethical implications of these online translation practices is lacking in depth and number. Ethical issues are only rarely addressed directly in the relevant literature and if so they are addressed only in passing. The special issue will tackle these two lacunae, with the groundwork having already been laid by our one-day symposium Translation on and over the Web: Disentangling its conceptual uncertainties and ethical questions, held in November 2021. Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2022 For more information, click here