No abstract

Throughout its disciplinary history, Translation Studies has critically engaged with issues intimately linked to language, culture, and society. It has problematized social categories, concepts, and historical time periods, attempting to place translation practice and theory in ever more meaningful contexts. The disciplinary reading of translation and localization technologies can be enhanced by moving beyond the observation and description of specific tools, procedures, and applications to inquire into the multiple, complex dynamics currently shaping practices of communication globally. At a time when many disciplines are in dialogue with others in order to share expertise and better understand the quickly evolving times we live in, Internet, Web, and Digital Culture Studies can serve as a complementary and useful approach for examining the roles of translation and translators in a technologically configured digital world of 24/7 communication. This article seeks to bring to Translation Studies a view from the digital world and the technologies that sustain it.

No abstract

The expanding field of network studies, which comprises histories, traditions and innovative research from myriad disciplines such as mathematics, the social sciences, linguistics, computer science, physics, biology, Internet and communication studies may find meaningful dialogue with the field of translation studies. This introductory article seeks to present a multifaceted and multi-tiered historical trajectory of the term and concept “network”, reflecting on the impact it has already had on studies in the domain of the sociology of translation. Can a network-based vocabulary emerging from network theories and studies, including recent works on network society, offer translation studies new conceptual tools with which to think through and articulate translation phenomena? By the same token, how might translation studies, viewing interlingual transfer in terms of product, process, profession, industry, politics and strategy, contribute to the growing body of research on the transmission and exchange of thoughts, ideas, messages, information, values, which characterize communication, the core of all translation activity? As connectivity and connectedness take on ever-important social organizing dimensions in a globalizing multilingual world, a translation-informed network approach as well as a network-informed translation theory approach may symbiotically help us better understanding human and social practices.

The World Wide Web (WWW) was formally introduced as a proposal in March 1989 (http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html) and implemented in May 1990 (http://info.cern.ch/) by Sir Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research). The novelty of the concept proposed was in its hypothetical capacity to share information easily over the Internet by deploying hyperlinked hypertext, encoded, displayable and retrievable through hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext markup language (HTML), by means of a browser. The Internet, a global system of interconnected computer networks based on the TCP/IP communications protocol standard, predated the Web by approximately thirty years. The "Web", which would eventually become the most widely used portion of this broader Internet, was made available to the public in 1991. The first Web browser with a graphical user interface (GUI), Mosaic, was introduced in 1993 and from this point on enabled users to interface more intuitively with the Web via icons and visuals rather than text commands. Technically, in a period of just 20 years, the Web has evolved from an information repository of posted static text Web pages to a dynamically charged user-interactive environment ("Web 2.0") of social networking sites, multimedia content-sharing sites, and real-time communication propelled on the back-end by diverse types of specialized servers, and database and content management systems (CMS). Web technologies and standards, linked to industry initiatives, academic research projects, and international organizations such as the W3C, Unicode Consortium and ICANN, continue to evolve rapidly.