Border crossings: translation studies and other disciplines

摘要

The development of translation studies as an independent discipline has been accompanied by various discussions on its nature. For example, it has been considered a discipline that draws upon theories and methods from literary studies and linguistic studies, and yet independent from both of them (Snell-Hornby, 1988); and interdisciplinary research in translation studies was marginally mentioned in the proceedings that witness the founding of the European Society for Translation Studies (Snell-Horny, Pochhacker, & Kaindl, 1994), though most articles in these proceedings merely borrowed concepts from adjacent disciplines. Nowadays, the independent status of translation studies is widely acknowledged, but it keeps interacting with many adjacent disciplines, such as cultural studies, history and sociology, making 'interdisciplinarity' a distinct feature of the field. Although efforts have been made to address some of the outstanding issues concerning the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies (see Ehrensberger-Dow, Gopferich, & O'Brien, 2013; Wang, 2015), some questions remain, for example, how should 'interdisciplinarity' be understood in current translation studies research? Has the status of translation studies as an independent academic discipline been recognized by other disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences or even the natural sciences? And how could such interdisciplinary research further enrich translation studies and the other disciplines involved? Against this background, this book represents a collective effort by a number of scholars from translation studies and other disciplines to clarify certain concepts and promote interdisciplinary research.