The Changing Translatorial Landscape

Translatorial practices have been under constant change over the past decades. Evolving technologies and digitalisation have constantly remodeled both the practicalities of translation and interpreting work and the cultural and economic understandings of multilingual communication.

The study of translatorial practices and professions provides opportunities to understand the effects of automatisation and technologisation many other fields are only entering into.

Our research group builds on the sociological research tradition in Translation Studies, an approach Tampere-based and Tampere-raised scholars have actively participated in creating. Working with a wide network of national and international collaborators, we use multiple methods (e.g. surveys, interviews and focus groups, traditional and virtual ethnography, usability research methods) to map and understand the current landscape and its ongoing change processes, looking into professional, paraprofessional and non-professional practices of written and oral translation.

In addition, the group creates innovations in the areas of user-centered translation (UCT) and service design.

Our research questions include:

• How does changing translation technology change translatorial practices and professions and the language industry?
• How does machine translation change professional practices and non-professional uses of translation?
• Is the understanding of translation changing?
• What kinds of professional profiles, boundaries and competence areas are emerging (new tasks; professional vs. paraprofessional work)?
• How do those working in various translatorial professions understand and negotiate their position in the changing landscape (role, agency, well-being at work, future prospects)?
• How and to what extent are actors socialized into different translatorial fields and how do they perceive their identity?
• What kinds of affective and ethical questions arise from this?

Kaisa Koskinen

Professor, head of research group

kaisa.a.koskinen [at] tuni.fi

+358 50 318 1193