ABSTRACT
The past decade has seen an increase in the amount of translation studies research focusing on translation in virtual environments, including translation blogs. While some work has suggested that translators build online communities through their blogs, no research has specifically examined how these communities are constructed. This chapter uses social network analysis and the graph visualisation and manipulation program Gephi to map the relations between the actors in three translation blog networks, based on the posts and comments published between January and December 2016. Specifically, this study focuses on how virtual environments such as blog networks push the boundaries of what we might consider a translator community, seeking to determine what kinds of actors make up the translation blog networks, how often the actors in one network also appear in one of the other networks, what communities might exist within the networks, and how often the networks cross geographic borders. While the results are not generalisable, they do point to areas that could be explored in greater depth in the future.
