Reconfiguring space in translation

The successful history of Translation Studies (TS) as an academic discipline was founded on its ability to combine methods and insights from neighbouring disciplines and on its ongoing dialogue with the translation profession. Along the way, TS developed and refined a series of paradigms and tenets accepted by the majority of scholars. These include dichotomic distinctions such as ‘source vs target’, and an emphasis on translations as “facts of the target culture” (Toury 2012). In today’s post-globalized world, the international language regime is still largely one in which English acts as the global lingua franca and translation as “a tool of distribution” (Pym 2016) which operates on the basis of a one-to-many geometry hinging on the lingua franca. However, new socio-cultural and technical factors have emerged with a direct impact on the practice of cross-language communication. Superdiversity and cosmopolitanism (Bielsa 2016) are today features of most societies and communities. Technology has revolutionized access to information from the point of view of both producers and receivers, with content now available in new, mostly “disembodied” (Littau 2016), formats. Language-wise, English is playing an increasingly significant role as a target language, not only in international communication but also in English-speaking countries. This paper illustrates how human geographers and sociologists have described the ways in which space is being reconfigured in today’s highly interconnected societies, and describes some increasingly significant or common translation scenarios that result from these reconfigurations of space.