Quo vadis, functional translatology?

Functional approaches to translation and Skopostheorie, on which many of them are based, have been around for more than thirty years now. Perhaps, therefore, it is time to take stock, trying to trace the development and spread of functionalist ideas and drawing some cautious conclusions as to where the future may lie. As a representative of the “second generation” and drawing on recent publications in journals and monographs on Translation Studies, I provide an overview of where young translation scholars who claim to take a “functionalist” viewpoint find themselves, what they are investigating, and which topics they consider worthy of research. Offering this insider view, I do not pretend, however, to present an objective picture of the functionalist approach nor to exhaustively cover the whole field of functionalism in translation and adjacent fields.