IATIS was founded in 2004 with an intentionally large set of aims to enable us to build on our historical and constitutional foundations, while adapting to a fast-changing and challenging world.

• Establish an organizational structure that will facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise and resources among scholars in various parts of the world;

• Stimulate interaction among scholars in different geographical regions;

• Encourage scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to explore areas of mutual concern.

These founding aims gave IATIS its original shape. Over time, the association has granted these initial formulations life and multiple meanings, as new generations of scholars, new regions, new questions and new challenges have grounded IATIS’ work and mission in multiple contexts that shape our world

Today, IATIS is a living, evolving scholarly community. Our members work on an extraordinary range of issues: climate and biodiversity, environmental justice, political activism and resistance, public health and humanitarian work, memory and heritage, museums and archives, digital cultures and social media, the visual and performing arts; multimodal communication; environmental ecologies, animal rights and the Rights of Nature; interspecies communication; biosemiotics; history and archives; literary systems; minority, vulnerable and endangered languages; Indigenous and First Nations relational research; knowledge systems and worldviews, including experiential and embodied experience; emotions; changing pedagogies; and new technologies and many more.

What connects this diversity is not a single definition of translation, but a shared set of questions to keep conceptualizing and practicing it with care and responsibility: Who speaks? Who is heard? Who is silenced? Who benefits from the circulation of knowledge? How do meanings change as they move across languages, cultures, places and histories? We understand translation not only as a technical skill, but as a deeply human practice that shapes relationships, identities, knowledge systems and power structures in ways that can harm and heal.

IATIS works deliberately to move beyond mainstream academic geographies and to decenter from the Global North. We organise conferences and activities in different parts of the world, not as symbolic gestures, but as a way of shifting who can participate, whose knowledge is shared, and whose voices are heard. This mobility changes perspectives. It opens space for regional scholars who might otherwise be excluded from international academic life, and it brings global scholars into contact with local languages, cultures and knowledge traditions. Conferences become spaces of encounter, friendship, learning and transformation, not just academic events.

IATIS is shaped by the languages, cultures, histories and lands of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, Europe and the Middle East. Our community is built through movement, connection and shared experience across these regions. Our work is grounded in ethical responsibility and a commitment to better the world in which we live. Aware that knowledge production is never neutral, we ask hard questions about whose knowledge counts, whose labour is invisible, and who benefits from systems of translation, technology and communication.

We are attentive to extractive practices, in scholarship, in technology, and in institutions, and we strive to build relational, participatory and reciprocal ways of working instead. We care about environmental and human costs, about justice, about dignity, and about accountability. We are guided by values of transparency, inclusion, equality, diversity and care. These values shape not only our research, but how we teach, collaborate, govern and support one another in and beyond academia.

IATIS has no headquarters, no property and no paid staff. Everything we do is sustained by people who give their time, energy and expertise. Our members organise conferences and workshops, develop training opportunities, edit journals and book series, mentor early-career scholars, commission and editing the IATIS Yearbook, offering mentoring and editorial support as part of the New Voices in Translation Studies journal, sharing news and information through our bulletin and online, serve on committees, make governance decisions, share knowledge, and build networks of care and collaboration.

Joining IATIS means becoming part of this family. Whether you are a student, an early-career researcher, a teacher, a practitioner or an established scholar, there is always a way to contribute, to participate and to belong. Our strength is not institutional power. It is collective goodwill, shared commitment and the desire to make a difference together.

IATIS continues to change as the world changes. We strive to respond to new political realities, new technologies, new forms of inequality and new ways of communicating and knowing, not through rigid definitions, but through practice: through dialogue and disagreement, learning and listening, solidarity and collaboration. Above all, IATIS is a living community: shaped by its members, sustained by generosity, kindness, solidarity and continually transformed by the work we do together.