The Translator: 25th anniversary editorial

It is with a great deal of pride that we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of The Translator and its continuing success as a leading publication in the field of translation studies. Reviewing the journal’s history over the intervening quarter century draws one’s attention to both the achievements of The Translator and the challenges facing the journal in the future. It seems appropriate, therefore, to use this editorial to reflect upon these achievements – including the contribution The Translator has made to the growth and evolution of research within the discipline – and also acknowledge the succession of key voices and works that have both influenced and reflected the transformation of scholarly and professional practice.

The first issue of The Translator appeared in 1995. It was produced by an equally new independent publishing house, St Jerome, and it soon established itself as an important voice in the field, covering both theoretical and applied areas and championing innovative research in both translation and interpreting. In its first few issues, the journal published contributions on topics ranging from Bible translation to feminist approaches, from court interpreting to questions of authorship, from the representations of translation and translators in science fiction to the insights provided by translation process analysis. It hosted new as well as established voices and covered most regions of the world. This broad range of interests and of scope has been maintained over the years and has remained a key element of the journal after its move to Routledge in 2014.

While the principal commitment of The Translator has always been to publish innovative research across all areas of translation and interpreting studies, its individual profile has also been marked by a number of distinguishing features. From its early days, the journal has published special issues devoted to topical themes, starting with volume 2:2, which was guest edited by Dirk Delabastita and focused on ‘Wordplay & Translation’. In the following years, monographic volumes covered ‘Translation and Minority’, ‘Dialogue Interpreting’, ‘Evaluation and Translation’, ‘Translating Humour’ and much more. The full list of special issue titles reads like a roll call of key research areas and often helps us to trace the moment when new questions and approaches emerged or established themselves as central concerns for researchers and practitioners: ‘The Return to Ethics’ in 2001, ‘Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting’ in 2005 or ‘Translating Violent Conflict’ in 2014 are just a few examples. Other features have included a rich ‘Reviews’ section, a regular slot devoted to ‘Revisiting the Classics’, or, in later years, the frequent appearance of ‘In Conversation’ pieces: dialogues which involve scholars and/or practitioners whose work sits within translation and interpreting studies or in close proximity with those areas, and which aim to reveal personal trajectories, reflections, positions or visions about the future of a constantly changing field.

After 25 years of publication history and having moved from two to four issues per year, the archive of The Translator offers a treasure trove of material for scholars of translation and interpreting. To celebrate this milestone we have chosen to delve into that archive and open it up, in a number of different ways. In this issue, we have included a selection of articles which reflect the ongoing attention of the journal to work that covers a wide range of topics with genuine international appeal, adopts diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, and also testifies to the ability of translation studies to examine critically its own history and practices.

We would like to think that continuity in editorial policy alongside high editorial standards has played a substantial part in shaping the contribution The Translator has made to the field. Accordingly, we invited the journal’s founding editor, Mona Baker, to engage ‘In Conversation’ with two of the current editors and two colleagues, Dirk Delabastita and Moira Inghilleri, who were, respectively, the guest editor of the first special issue and a previous book review editor and co-editor. Far from constituting a nostalgic trip into the past, their dialogue connects personal memories of the journal’s history to crucial current questions about the role of academic journals, the material and professional constraints which affect academic publications, the agency we can exercise within our chosen fields, and ways in which scholarship and research talk not only about but also back to power structures and social hierarchies.

These individual perspectives into the history of The Translator also prompt us to explore or rediscover its past issues. In collaboration with Routledge, we decided to offer online and free of charge a selection of 10 articles (https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/the-translator-25-anniversary/)– one from each of the first 10 years of the journal’s publication. This initiative is another way to celebrate the breadth and quality of the research published in the journal. It was a challenging task to choose just 10 articles, but we were pleased at the opportunity to re-read and reflect on that first decade. In making our selection we aimed to choose papers which best represent the issues from that period and resonate with contemporary translation studies concerns. Of course, this selective approach cannot reflect the full range of the journal in terms of focus, theoretical resources, geographical spread, methodologies and so on; but readers will be able to access articles by leading scholars dealing with a wide variety of topics, ranging from activism to the translation of camp talk, from translation and ethnography to the role of interpreters as intercultural agents. Every one of them has left its mark in the field and influenced further research. It would be impossible (and beyond the point) to summarise them all here and to trace their individual impact. Instead, we are asking a number of scholars to reflect on what each of the 10 articles has meant for them and for their specialist area. These reflections will appear online as short companion pieces to the individual articles: we invite you to look out for them over the next few months by checking the online page (https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/the-translator-25-anniversary/).

Finally, rather than engaging with new publications, the two book reviews in this celebratory issue revisit titles that were reviewed in The Translator’s first and second volumes. Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823, edited by Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney and published in 1994 by The Kent State University Press, was the first book ever to be reviewed in The Translator. Now in a revised and expanded two-volume second edition (2009), the book’s relevance and innovation 25 years later are core to Kathryn Batchelor’s review, which also engages with the original 1995 review, written by the late Professor Marilyn Gaddis Rose (1930–2015). In 1996, Cecilia Wadensjö reviewed Susan Berk-Seligson’s The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process (The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Returning to that review and to the book, now also in its second edition (2017), Wadensjö reads across the years to comment on the innovation of Berk-Seligson’s empirical study, its impact on interpreting studies research and the extent to which it has stood the test of time.

There were other titles from those first two volumes of The Translator we would have liked to have revisited, but our efforts to track down copies for potential reviewers – especially if the title has not since been reissued – proved difficult, particularly so in a year when we were all hampered by university library closures. Two examples are Rosemary Arrojo’s Tradução, desconstrução e psicanálise [Translation, deconstruction and psychoanalysis] (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1993), reviewed in 1995 by Heloisa Gonçalves Barbosa, and Translation as Discovery, by Sujit Mukherjee (London: Sangam Books, 1994; first printed in Hyderabad in 1981), reviewed by Shantha Ramakrishna in 1996. Arrojo’s collection of essays is just one of several non-English titles reviewed in those first years of the journal. In the six issues of the first three volumes, 31 reviews were published. In addition to the review of Arrojo’s Portuguese collection, eight of these discussed French titles, four German and two Spanish (one of which was a translation from Catalan). Although still confined to European languages (albeit with titles from the Americas), this multi-lingual diversity is rare in more recent review pages.

From machine translation and terminology to literary translation, translation theory and translation history, the themes of the reviewed titles from the first three volumes reflect how The Translator was contributing to the shaping of our discipline. There are several titles on interpreting, still a nascent research field 25 years ago, and a review of The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature and Comparative Poetics (by Eugene Chen Eoyang, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), an early foray into what is now a major interest in our field. We can also note the monumental effort of Anthony Pym, who wrote a review on no less than five volumes of The Medieval Translator (edited by Roger Ellis and published with various publishers from 1989 to 1995). Pym writes of his fascination with medieval studies, an area of research marked by a strong focus on people – a focus that can shift our attention away from abstract theorising. ‘Entering this world’, writes Pym, ‘outsiders like myself soon become aware that we have been living and studying in the era of the relatively subjectless translator. It is a valuable lesson’ (89–90). Today, as we shift our attention to the material world, the more-than-human and the ecologies of matter and meaning in which we are all enmeshed, we still have many more valuable lessons to learn.

As we celebrate 25 years of the journal and look forward at the same time, we would like to acknowledge and thank all those colleagues who have made tremendous contributions to the journal over the years: the members past and present of our advisory board; our guest editors; our army of reviewers; and of course our many authors. As present editors, we would like to pay particular tribute to the colleagues who have given valuable time and considerable effort to reviewing submissions. It remains one of the most gratifying aspects of the editorial role that, more often than not, we have been able to provide authors with the kind of detailed feedback and supportive critiques from reviewers that we appreciate receiving ourselves.