ABSTRACT
The author looks into the current processes of globalization and their social, political, economic and linguistic consequences for contemporary life, institutions and the workplace. She also looks at what these developments mean for translation and translation quality assessment and discusses the role of the English language in its function as a global lingua franca and the way it might affect the nature and frequency of translation worldwide. The globalization of discourse makes it necessary to problematize and relativize basic cultural values and orientations such as these which are transmitted and expressed in and through language. In order to investigate what globalization does to discourse, we need to examine how language functions in different societies, where language needs to be broken down as those richly contextualized forms that occur in society. Translation is therefore not simply a by-product of globalization, but an integral part of it. The author discusses some of the consequences globalization processes on translation and translation quality assessment.
