When we wrote to Routledge with our proposal for the new journal Translation Studies in 2006, the discipline of translation studies had become firmly established after several decades of particularly rapid growth. We believed that translation studies had now reached a stage where it could afford to move out into a wider arena, while also beginning to systematically interrogate its own assumptions and hierarchies. At the time, such a move seemed all the more important in that global experiences of cultural identity – inextricable from issues of translation in its widest and narrowest sense – were being problematized to an unprecedented extent in the academic and the public sphere. That context applies if anything even more today, 10 years on.
The landscape of translation studies journal publishing was much less diverse than it is at present, with individual journals often remaining tied to a particular approach. We saw a need for a more global and more methodologically open publication that could harness the discipline’s potential by developing new and promising lines of work within translation studies, with an emphasis on exploring existing and potential links with neighbouring disciplines. We wanted the journal to be truly inter- and transdisciplinary: on the one hand offering a forum for translation studies to engage with other areas of interests, methodologies and conceptual frameworks; on the other, creating opportunities for translation research to add a new dimension to the enormous range of disciplines that were then adopting “translation” as a trope.
Our aim was to open up channels of communication that would enrich and deepen the debate on both sides. One especially productive example of such encounters proved to be the notion of “cultural translation”, a term then experiencing almost inflationary interest and one that we felt required far more careful examination, more sophisticated reflection, in order to avoid becoming a mere slogan. The journal’s first special issue, on interdisciplinary uses of the term “translation”, and the forum on cultural translation that ran from volume 2:2 to volume 3:3 put these issues up for debate. The theme was well received, prompting heated discussion, and the forum format itself, with its provocative opening essay and series of responses, turned out to be timely and highly productive. Translation Studies has succeeded, we believe, in putting cultural translation on the agenda and helping to build more solid foundations for a rich and fertile notion that seems likely to gain increasing scholarly importance given current social and political debates.
Apart from the thematic forum, our original proposal imagined many other formats to complement the classic research article. Bibliographical essays, for example, or an account of a translation- or interpreting-related incident and its political and social impact, were possible ideas; we also thought about presenting a meta-level discussion of developments in the discipline, for example by looking at thematic clusters of conferences or publications. The stream of high-quality articles and the continuation of the forum series left no space for these more unconventional formats, but they might come to fruition in future ventures of the journal.
Looking back on our own experience of initiating and editing the journal for its first five years, what remains most vivid for both of us is the pleasure of working with such thoughtful, innovative and enthusiastic authors and reviewers. Among them were many young scholars setting out on their careers, whose work we particularly wanted to nurture and from whom we learned so much. A journal can only be a collaborative project, and we enjoyed these contacts immensely – quite apart from the fun, creativity and sometimes steep learning curves of our work together as editors. On our shared path we experienced translation as a special kind of negotiation: as a way of life that can bring together scholarship and friendship.