ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the connections between translation, pragmatics and social media. The author situates the reader by providing a brief history of social media as an object of study and by defining ‘pragmatic’ and ‘social media’, terms which are polysemous within academe and beyond. An interdisciplinary review of extant literature in pragmatics, translation studies and social media studies is conducted and reveals the scant number of studies that explicitly connect all three disciplinary spheres. However, the review also notes novel case studies, which are further scrutinised after the initial findings (section 4.1). For instance, the concept of language binaries is problematised in light of the multilingual nature of social media, which has applicability for how we conceptualise and study online translation (section 4.2); the translation of emojis calls into question what constitutes “language“ and how these are used in various online “conversations“ (section 4.3) to indicate sarcasm or humour, to name only these examples; and finally, the use and translation of hashtags is considered, whether these are used to index content or as a meta-discursive device (section 4.4). Though further concilience and empirical research would be welcome, there is evidence to suggest interdisciplinary research in this area is gaining momentum.
