Translation in Transition 2024

About the conference

Background: The Translation in Transition series of conferences has established itself as a central meeting point for researchers in the field of empirical translation studies through previous editions in Copenhagen, Germersheim, Ghent, Barcelona, Kent and Prague.

Objective: In its seventh installment, held at the Shota Rustaveli State University in Batumi, it once again wants to be a forum of discussion for empirical research that is based on any kind of empirical methodology and that advances our knowledge in the fields of translation and interpreting. While the Batumi edition will be open to various topics within empirical translation studies, we also want to put special emphasis on two directions: low-resourced and less-researched language pairs, as well as an interplay between different methods and data types, e.g. combining product and process research.

 Conference topics

We welcome contributions grounded in empirical approaches to studying both interlingual and intralingual translation (including interpreting) as well as theoretical and position papers on the following topics:

• Empirical methods and models (corpus-based, corpus-driven, experimental) or methods derived from computational linguistics and data mining (e.g. computational semantics, pragmatics) applied to translation studies

• Presentation of new resources for translation studies (spoken corpora, multimodal corpora, interpreting transcript datasets, corpora of low-resourced languages, lexicons, databases, etc.)

• Application of parallel corpora for contrastive linguistics

• Method and data triangulation: combined use of corpus data and methods and other sources of data

• Detection and analysis of specific features of translation (translationese, interpretese, editese, machine translationese, post-editese, etc.) using parallel and comparable corpora

• Analysis and interpretation of variation in translation/interpreting, e.g. variation driven through language contrasts, register/genre, expertise, mode, etc.

• Empirical analysis of specialised translation, e.g. legal translation, medical translation, technical translation and others

• Analysis of non-canonical forms of translation/interpreting and multilingual communication

• Cognitive and computational insights of variation in translation/interpreting and translationese/interpretese

• Cognitive modeling of translation and interpreting processes, including cognitive load measurements

• Translation and interpreting quality assessment and evaluation using corpora or experimental research

• Translation/interpreting in specific settings: between close languages, from a third language, non-native translation, indirect/relay translation, etc.

•  The use of corpora in translator and/or interpreter training

• Improving understanding of translation/ interpreting in the context of NLP

• Computer-assisted translation and/or interpreting (CAT/CAI)

• Machine translation (MT): analysis, evaluation, selection and preparation of data for MT, ‘machine translationese’

The official language of the conference is English.