The Methodological Implications of Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies

Abstract

As we have argued elsewhere, complexity thinking originated in the natural sciences and is thus dominated by quantitative research methods. Translating these into rigorous qualitative methods is an ongoing endeavor in fields of studies in the humanities. While the integration of a complexity perspective into translation studies is still in its children’s shoes, work done in other fields of the human and social sciences as well as some research that has been done in complexity approaches to translation studies are starting to yield some insight into possible avenues to pursue. This chapter explores the methodological implications of the philosophy of complexity. It then moves to recent suggestions, in particular from sociology, as to methods that might fit a complexity perspective. Lastly, the paper explains and explores a number of key concepts from complexity theory that might be translated into qualitative methods for research. For each of these concepts, we propose to add a short section to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept. We do so by engaging an existing piece of research by asking what contribution this concept could have made to the research in order to demonstrate its use.