The Metalanguage of Translation

“Let the meta-discussion begin,” James Holmes urged in 1972. Coming almost forty years later – years filled with fascinating and often unexpected developments in the interdiscipline of Translation Studies – this volume offers the reader a multiplicity of meta-perspectives, while also moving the discussion forward. Indeed, the (re)production and (re)use of metalinguistic metaphors frame and partly determine our views on research, so such a discussion is vital ­as it is in any scholarly discipline. Among other questions, the eleven contributors draw the reader’s attention to the often puzzling variations of usage and conceptualization in both the theory and the practice of translation.
First published as a special issue of Target 19:2 (2007), the volume runs the gamut of metalinguistic topics, ranging from terminology, localization and epistemological questions, through the Chinese perspective, to the conceptual mapping of the online Translation Studies Bibliography.

Dirk Delabastita, University of Namur, Belgium:
The metalanguage that we inhabit as translation scholars is so natural to us that we often forget how much it guides our thoughts, delineates the blind spots in our thinking, determines our partners for intellectual debate, and defines the terms of that debate. This volume, which moves freely between epistemological reflection and practical recommendations, and which ranges from Aristotle to the terminology of software localization, is a very important contribution to a very important discussion.