Specialised Translation: An Orientation

Abstract

Writing some 15 years ago, the pioneering translation scholar Wolfram Wilss (Wilss 1999: 9) estimated that ‘specialist’ translation accounted for some 80 per cent of the total volume of translation (the other 20 per cent being literary and Bible translation). In a lecture a few years later,1 Geoffrey Kingscott, a leading professional translator, businessman and writer, estimated that over 90 per cent of the world’s translation output was accounted for by ‘technical and commercial translation’. A similar estimate was made by Franco Aixela in the new millennium (2004), in an agenda-setting piece for the launch of JoSTrans. Yet in the scholarly arena, research in ‘non-literary’ translation is said to have lagged behind its literary counterpart (ibid.). So, in addition to investigating when ‘technical and scientific translation came to be a “research field in its own right”’, Franco Aixela estimates that ‘80–90% of the professional demand for translators’ is accounted for by ‘technical translating’, whilst a much lower percentage of publications in Translation Studies2 are concerned with this field (10.2 per cent in the 1990s, rising from 1.4 per cent pre-1950) (2004: 31, 44, 34). The small-scale journal survey reported in Chapter 1 suggests, however, that, some 15 years later, at least in the journals investigated, the balance between research articles concerned with literary or specialised translation may be changing. Nevertheless, that is not to deny that the number of journals devoted to literary issues including literary translation vastly outweighs those dedicated to specialised languages and specialised translation.