Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2006

While a critical mass of scholarship may have been reached to launch a journal such as TIS, much work needs to be done in developing allies and growing the field of translation and interpreting studies in the United States. This paper attempts to outline a few natural academic allies—programs in creative writing, area studies, com-parative literature, and anthropology. While looking at the respective strengths of the translation scholarship in these allied fields, I also offer a critique of some of those pro-grams. The goal is to point out areas of interest that will mutually benefit both translation studies and other fields. The paper is divided into five parts: (1) The 2004 ATSA Confer-ence; (2) The First US Translation Studies Scholar; (3) The Present State of Translation Studies in the United States; (4) Connections with Emerging Area Studies Programs; and (5) Connections with Comparative Literature and Anthropology. I conclude by suggesting that, while a critical mass may have been reached to start a journal, much work needs to be done in broadening the scope of our organization to include potential partners. The goal is to build a truly open and inclusive discipline, one that reflects the true range of ongoing translation studies investigations in the country.

This article presents an overview of the state of interpreting studies from the origins of the profession to the current state of the field. It explores the in-terconnection between interpreting and translation studies and the evolution of inter-preting into a field of study in its own right. Since interpreting is an interdisciplinary endeavor, this article argues for the need to continue to expand perspectives, paying special consideration to perspectives from related fields. It takes a closer look at interpreting as a situated practice, as it unfolds in courts of law, health care organi-zations, and business environments. It suggests the need for a deeper dialogue among all related disciplines and suggests a research agenda for the future.

Evidence from several translation market surveys suggests that many students of translation may not be receiving adequate training, particularly in the personal and inter-personal skills that they will need upon graduation in the rapidly changing field of language mediation. This article investigates the multi-cluster na-ture of ‘translator competence’ and its implications for a multi-facetted approach to translator education. In drawing upon recent work involving the application of com-plexity theory to educational issues, the article moves beyond neo-Vygotskian social constructivism as the key guiding principle for translator education. Complexity the-ory is used to show how a principled combination of transmissionist, transactional and transformational teaching approaches might be more effective than any one approach alone.

"Summary translation" is a form of translation that is much more common in the federal government than in commercial environments, and so is rarely studied and generally ill understood. While it involves many of the processes that emerge in the nor-mal full translation task (verbatim translation in government parlance), because the final result of this cross-language task is a summary as well as a translation, the summary translator must effectively integrate the component cognitive processes of both summari-zation and translation. The extreme transactional influence of the request for information that initiates a summary translation produces at least four significant areas of difference between summary and full translation, which involve: the extent of semantic reduction and linguistic compression/expansion, the extent of source-text/target text correspondence, and the differential weighting of semantic content. Each of these areas of difference has implications for some of the gross cognitive processes underlying translation: text com-prehension (from reading or listening), hierarchical discourse processing, mental model construction, task-based decision-making/problem-solving, and text production.

Using an expanded version of Gregory Bateson’s model of the double-bind, the article explores conflicting ideological norms governing the translator’s loyalties to countries, cultures, and languages through a series of doubly-bound commands.