Introduction to Translation and Interpreting Studies

2 Key Concepts and Theoretical Approaches

Kirsten Malmkjær

Objectives

• Introduce the disciplines of translation studies and interpreting studies and their sub-branches.
• Introduce concepts and notions that characterize these.
• Introduce a number of approaches to the disciplines.
• Highlight major features of these.

2.1 Introduction

This chapter offers an overview of concepts that are and have been central in translation studies and interpreting studies and of major theoretical approaches to these subjects. Some of the concepts have been with us for as long as there have been (documented) writings on translation and interpreting; others have developed along the way of the disciplines’ histories and interaction with disciplines that have from time to time shared their concerns or seemed to translation and interpreting practitioners and theorists to be of relevance to their own pursuits.

The emphasis in this chapter is on translation studies, and interpreting studies, as the former discipline has developed since the 1960s. General acknowledgement of interpreting studies as a discipline in its own right arguably followed a decade or so later.

The chapter begins with the overarching concepts of translation studies (Section 2.2.1) and interpreting studies (Section 2.2.2) themselves because their very names embody conceptualizations of their referents as something beyond practice and physical activity alone. Translation and interpreting, the expressions suggest, are not simply practices ...