The Many Contexts of Translation (Studies)

This article examines the ways in which, in just a couple of decades, and in view of the interdisciplinary nature of Translation Studies, the key notion of context has become increasingly broader and diversified within this area of research, allowing for complex analyses of the translators’ activities and decisions, of translation processes and, ultimately, of what accounts for the meaning(s) of a translated text. Consequently, some (brief) incursions are made into a number of (main) directions of the discipline and the related kinds of contexts they prioritized in investigating translation both as process and product. In the second section of this introductory article, the issue of context is particularized through references to the contributions in this special volume, which add new layers of meaning to context, touching upon further perspectives from which this complex notion could be approached.