Complexity and the Place of Translation in Digital Humanities

Abstract

Although a fundamentally humanistic discipline and an activity that takes its drive from human action, translation studies has only very recently started to consider complexity as a suitable paradigm. After four decades of reductionist thought, complexity signals the need for translation studies to acknowledge entropy—the tendency of the universe towards disorder—and the decentralization of translation activities as a characteristic of translation activities in more recent years. Perhaps more significantly, complexity raises the problem of new methodologies that are capable of revealing the n-dimensionality of any translation act. In this context, this chapter examines the possibilities of aligning translation studies to the latest developments in digital humanities and of seeing translation scholarship and scholarly collaboration in translation studies as profoundly non-linear.. As a case in point, I analyze the full corpus of abstracts presented at the 2019 EST congress by means of computational semantic analysis (more specifically, topic modelling and tf-idf). Capturing the multiplicity of translation discourses—in the plural—is essential for mapping out the complexity underpinning the discipline of translation studies, like many scholars before us have rightfully argued.