Translation Studies: Pre-Discipline, Discipline, Interdiscipline, and Post-Discipline

In the West, Translation Studies as a discipline has a very short but lively history. Founded in the early 1970s in the Low Countries—Holland and Belgium—translation studies is a fairly new field. Yet, today some theorists suggest that the discipline is too limited to translated texts and excludes much translation data being generated from other fields of inquiry, including theater, art, architecture, ethnography, memory studies, media studies, philosophy, and psychology. This paper has four sections: ‘Pre-Discipline’, in which I discuss the period after World War II and up until the 1970s; ‘Discipline’, which discusses the founding period of translation studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s; ‘Interdiscipline’, which focuses on the expanding field in its many collaborations with outside groups in the 1990s and 2000s; and (4) Post-Discipline, a new phase that further expands the definitions of the field. I refer to some of my work from Translation and Identity in the Americas (2008) and discuss the concept “post-translation studies” as posited by Siri Nergaard and Stephano Arduini in their article “Translation: A New Paradigm” (2011) in the introduction to the new journal called translation.