Introduction

In the field of translation studies, the term “post-translation studies” has been introduced to try to expand the kinds of texts and objects that scholars examine. The name was coined by Siri Nergaard and Stephano Arduini in “Translation: A New Paradigm” (2011), the introduction to the first issue of a new journal called Translation, founded in 2011. They wrote, “We propose the inauguration of a transdisciplinary research field with translation as an interpretive as well as an operative tool. We imagine a sort of new era that could be termed post-translation studies, where translation is viewed as fundamentally transdisciplinary, mobile, and open-ended” (2011: 8). They go on to suggest that the field open itself to investigations of translation from outside the discipline-from art, architecture, ethnography, memory studies, landscape, psychology, semiotics, philosophy, economics, gender studies, race, class, and ethnic studies. In Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Spivak discussed opening up the field of comparative literature, which she viewed as Eurocentric and based on outdated comparative literary studies. Instead she called for a broader array of disciplinary investigations, which necessarily included gender, minority, and Third World discourses and their translation. In a similar fashion, some scholars find the field of translation studies too narrow, text-centric, and based upon European definitions and models derived in the 1970s and early 1980s. Research on translational phenomena need not be inscribed within a single discipline. Rather, translation phenomena appear in all languages, major and minor discourses, and in many forms of communication, not just written texts. These elements need to be allowed to flourish, inform, and instruct. Additionally, Nergaard and Arduini suggest that investigators be open to poststructuralist theory, gender, and border studies, demonstrating more attention to the happenings along the edges and interstices than what is going on in the center or mainstream. Their journal reflects that interest. Special issues of the journal Translation are forthcoming on the question of memory, edited by Bella Brodzki and Cristina Demaria; on space, edited by Sherry Simon; on conflict, edited by Emily Apter and Mona Baker; and economics, edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon. The shift in focus from

translation as the center of a single discipline, to multidisciplinary analyses shows how translations impact many disciplines and signifies a new direction for the field. In addition, the discourse on translation from the outside field can help scholars better analyze the translational phenomena considered from within.