What's In a Name? Mapping the Translation Industry

In this chapter, we set ourselves the not-insignificant task of outlining and defining the translation industry. We first map the emergence of a new disciplinary sub-field that we call Translation Industry Studies and interrogate the nomenclature that is used to describe it, drawing on a bibliometric analysis of terms used in published abstracts over the last 40 years. We then turn our attention to the meanings and identities associated with different names and explore our proposed definition of the translation industry in more depth, problematising and (hopefully) clarifying some of the conceptual fuzziness that surrounds key concepts such as “profession” and “industry”. We go on to consider a range of pressing current “talking points” in relation to the changing industry landscape, including of course the ever-growing influence of technologies such as generative AI. We close the chapter in a more traditional vein, with a brief overview of the structure and content of the handbook as a whole.