Introductory Comments

Although written by a European with limited knowledge of translation practice and translation studies in China (albeit with some familiarity of developments over the last decade or so), this article focuses on some issues central to today's globalised translation studies. I believe that many issues associated with this globalisation call for a re-examination of basic tenets in translation studies. This is necessary to assess the changed emphasis that globalisation is bringing about, which will affect future translation work as well. In this article, I will discuss how complicated the world of translation has become in the age of globalisation. I believe that scholars from emerging countries, including China, may be better prepared to tackle the new challenges than are those scholars nurtured in Western thinking. Western scholars have studied problems largely restricted to translation between Indo-European languages and religious and literary translation, problems that are – quantitatively – insignificant in today's translation work.

Introduction: Stages in Translation

The basis of the present discussion is that translation is a type of communication that occurs by means of a transfer of meaningful verbal messages from one culture to another through the following stages:

A sender > a source-language message > translational activity > a target-language message that target-language recipients accept as a simulacrum of the message in the source language.