“The Changing Landscape of the Translation Profession: For Better or For Worse?”

The success story of Translation Studies (TS) and translation practice has been much discussed during the past sixty years. The study of translation flourished, while the translation profession grew to such an extent that it is regularly being labeled as one of the best and most promising professions with the most prospects and a favorable work-life balance. Yet, during the past decade this growth went hand-in-hand with an unprecedented globalization, mind-blowing technological innovations as well as an economic turmoil that shifted the governments’ priorities and the dynamics of business. All of these developments and new realities did not leave the translation landscape unaffected: Computer-assisted Translation (CAT) and particularly Translation Memories (TM) are sine qua non, Machine Translation (MT) and post-editing are gaining commercial ground, inverse or Non-native Speaker (NNS) translation as well as crowdsourcing ‘solutions’ are becoming increasingly popular, while prices fall and working conditions worsen. In this presentation an attempt will be made to explore how these new developments affect translators and what can be done to counterbalance the negative side-effects.

Dr Vilelmini Sosoni is Lecturer in Translation at the Ionian University, Greece. She has previously taught Translation at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the Institut Français d’ Athènes and AKMI Metropolitan College. She also has extensive industrial experience having worked as freelance translator, editor and subtitler, as well as in-house project manager and translator. Her research interests lie in the areas of institutional translation, text linguistics and translation, Machine Translation (MT), translation quality and intercultural communication. She has participated in EuropeAid projects and has published articles in international journals and edited volumes.