Research on translation technology teaching in Chinese publications and in international English-language publications (1999-2020): a bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT

The growing need to improve the quality and efficiency of translation by using technology has stimulated the practice of and research into translation technology teaching (TTT). Naturally, there is a need to analyse the state of the art and development of TTT from a quantitative perspective, because such research is still very scarce. This paper uses the bibliometric technologies, CiteSpace and VOSviewer in particular, to delineate the publication information of TTT-related research mainly in two citation databases, i.e., Web of Science (WoS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), from the year 1999 to 2020. It finds that China is gaining importance in TTT-related research, that international English-language publications pay more attention to the teaching of MTPE, while Chinese-language publications focus more on corpus-based TTT, and that English publications tend to use empirical methods, while Chinese publications tend to adopt non-empirical methods. The differences between the two publication communities in research methods and focuses call for contact and exchange between the two communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation technology teaching (TTT)
• bibliometric analysis
• CiteSpace
• VOSviewer

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to Nataša pavlović, Youlan Tao, Huashu Wang and the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive and thought–provoking comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in ‘figshare’ at 10.6084/m9.figshare.14798508.v1

Notes

1. In this paper, we have reviewed TTT-related papers included in CNKI and WoS. CNKI includes academic research papers written mostly in Chinese by Chinese scholars and published in Chinese publications. CNKI may not include Chinese academic papers written by Chinese scholars from Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and other regions. For this reason, the expressions ‘China’, ‘Chinese scholars’ and ‘Chinese academic community’ used in the present paper only refer to the Chinese academic community centred on China’s mainland. They do not represent Chinese-speaking scholars in the areas outside China’s mainland where people also speak the Chinese language. WoS includes papers mostly written and published in international English-language publications. Hereafter ‘Chinese-language publications’ and ‘international English-language publications’ are called ‘Chinese publications’ and ‘English publications’ for short. ‘Chinese publications’ and ‘English publications’ here do not refer to publications by Chinese scholars or English scholars. They only refer to publications that are in the Chinese language or the English language.

2. All TTT-related research papers we have selected from WoS are written in the English language.

3. When we imported the text files containing publication information of 143 TTT-related research papers retrieved and selected from WoS, only 138 papers were recognised by CiteSpace and VOSviewer.

4. For a given item, the Links and Total Link Strength attributes indicate, respectively, the number of links of an item with other items and the total strength of the links of an item with other items (van Eck and Waltman 2013). In the case of co-country links between countries, the Links attribute indicates the number of co-country links of a given country with other countries. The Total Link Strength attribute indicates the total strength of the co-country links of a given country with other countries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [17BYY103 and 21BYY017].