9
Translating in Theory and Action: Contemporary 
Contexts in T ranslation
One of the challenges of Translation Studies is to shed light on the elusive figure of the 
translator, carefully hidden from the view of the audience. Since Lawrence Venuti’s seminal 
work on translator invisibility (1995), an increasing number of studies have attempted 
to explore the role of the translator from various angles (e.g., Wilson 2009; McAuliffe 
2016; Kadiu 2019). It is not surprising that the image of the translator or interpreter is 
gradually shifting from that of an inconspicuous assistant to an indispensable participant in 
communication, bridging linguistic as well as cultural barriers. In turn, Translation Studies 
as a scholarly discipline must keep abreast of the developments in translation as a profession, 
reflect on and respond to them from a theoretical and methodological standpoint.
Some of the deliberations ultimately resulted in the present special issue of ELOPE. When 
compiling the Call for Papers, our main objective was to open up a space for researchers to reflect 
on and rethink the role of different categories of translation and interpreting in contemporary 
contexts, engaging with both theory and practice. In addition, given the prominent and 
occasionally almost exclusive position of English in international communication and the 
scope of ELOPE as primarily an English Studies journal, the idea was to examine in particular 
the complex, dynamic and rapidly changing relationship between translation and English as 
the global lingua franca, an intriguing academic subject for many years (cf. Anderman and 
Rogers 2005; Taviano 2010, House 2013; Palumbo 2013; Pisanski Peterlin 2013; Taviano 
2018). Although it may seem that cross-cultural communication is increasingly reduced to 
monolingual exchanges in English, research into diverse forms of translation and interpreting 
reaffirms their presence and place in the globalized world.
As the Table of Contents indicates, the submissions not only matched but even exceeded the 
projected scope of the special issue. Several papers re-examine the visibility of translators and 
interpreters from different angles, ranging from the recognition of their professional status 
to their physical visibility and function in re-voicing the text when rendering it in other 
languages. Another dimension, explored from the point of view of visibility, is the practice of 
translation itself, particularly in terms of its presence in the traditionally monolingual settings 
of the English-speaking world. Methodologically, the authors used a variety of qualitative 
and quantitative approaches, including interdisciplinary ones, reflecting the current state of 
the field.
Although thematic lines were not always clear-cut, revealing the interdisciplinarity that has 
permeated Translation Studies for some time (cf., Zupan and Nuč 2017; Ehrensberger-
Dow et al. 2018;  Kocijančič Pokorn and Mikolič Južnič  2020), we decided to divide the 
articles into four sections. The first addresses the theme of the visibility of translation and 
interpreting from three different perspectives. Tamara Mikolič Južnič and Nike Kocijančič 
Pokorn explore the profile of the community interpreter, juxtaposing it with that of the 
intercultural mediator, to underscore the visibility of the interpreter’s profession. Their 
INTRODUCTION

10  Translating in Theory and Action: Contemporary Contexts in Translation
comparison of the competences of the two profiles facilitates a clearer insight into the role 
of the community interpreter, highlighting the importance of having interpreting services in 
high-risk situations provided by trained professionals. Aleksandra Nuč and Sonja Pöllabauer 
examine the physical visibility of interpreters in transborder humanitarian interpreting. Using 
photographs taken along the Slovene and Austrian border during the mass displacement 
of refugees from the Middle East between 2015 and 2018, the authors study these images 
as ethnographic records of interpreting, which reveal a high degree of interactional agency 
and physical visibility, but less social visibility. In the third article of this section, Giuseppe 
Palumbo addresses the issue of visibility of translation in the Anglo-American cultural and 
publishing settings, investigating the position of English as the “hyper-central” language in 
the international system of translations. The paper examines the significance of translated 
titles in the publishing markets of English-speaking countries, and the increasingly prominent 
role ascribed to translation. His exploratory analysis of records on book translation in the US 
spanning from 2008 to the present indicates the renewed attention given to translation in 
the US market.
The second section turns to translator and interpreter training, a field that is increasingly 
focusing on establishing interdisciplinary links with related research areas. Astrid 
Schmidhofer, Enrique Cerezo Herrero and Melita Koletnik explore foreign language 
teaching in Translation and Interpreting programmes, proposing that Translation and 
Interpreting-oriented Language Learning and Teaching be established as a separate category 
of Language for Specific Purposes. Such foreign language teaching would focus on both 
enhancing communicative competence and developing the initial competences relevant for 
translation and interpreting. Their survey engaging students from Austria, Slovenia and Spain 
helped identify areas to which the students attribute particular importance, and should thus 
be considered in the TI-oriented curricula design. Martina Paradiž presents a smartphone 
application that can be used in bilingual glossary compilation, exploring another angle of 
using translation in language learning. The author presents the results of a student survey 
on the usability, perceived benefits and feedback on the features of an Android mobile 
application built by the author. The section closes with a paper on consecutive note-taking by 
Csilla Szabó. Although note-taking is taught at all interpreter training institutions, opinions 
still vary on questions such as what and how much to note down or what language and 
notation system to use in the notes. By first revisiting prescriptive views, followed by insights 
based on empirical research, the author proposes her own recommendations on how to teach 
note-taking today.
The literary translation section comprises two articles on the translation of poetry, a domain 
of translation where the “licence for creative agency is perhaps most evident” (Summers 2020, 
36). In the first, Tjaša Mohar and Tomaž Onič provide an overview of Margaret Atwood’s 
poetry in Slovene translation. Although the Canadian author has published as many poetry 
collections as novels, her poetry remains relatively unknown among Slovene readers in their 
native language, given that only around thirty poems have been translated into Slovene and 
published sporadically in various literary magazines. The authors provide a stylistic analysis 
of a few selected poems, particularly those that are challenging for translation. In the second 
article on poetry translation, Jean Boase-Beier examines the stylistic aspects of the translation 

11 INTRODUCTION
of a German poem, ‘Stunde der Wölfe’ by Volker von Torne, into English. As the author 
points out, the original poem features a number of metaphors based on wolves, birds, paths 
or journeys, which serve as images of curtailment, intervention and impediment caused by 
natural agents such as wolves, hawks, wind and snow. As shown in the article, the translator 
must consider the interaction of all these elements in order to preserve the central images and 
stylistic patterns.
The last section investigates the relationship between translation and language through 
discourse, genre and semantic prosody. Snježana Veselica Majhut’s study of multilingual 
websites created by Croatian tourist boards centres on a quality assessment of the English 
translations. Her analysis considers different aspects of the text, ranging from linguistic 
categories, such as spelling, grammar and idiomaticity, translation-based categories, such 
as pragmatic equivalence and translation of culture-bound lexical items, to genre-related 
questions concerning web readability. Tadej Pahor, Martina Smodiš and Agnes Pisanski 
Peterlin take genre as the starting point in their analysis of translations of research article 
abstracts from Slovene into English by focusing on authorial presence. Pahor et al. consider 
the effect of translation on the interplay between personal and impersonal rhetorical patterns 
in academic writing. The section closes with Primož Jurko’s analysis of cross-linguistic data 
for Slovene and English, focusing on ADV-V patterns. The study relies on a top-down corpus-
driven approach, attempting to shed light on the meaning-forming process in some of the 
most frequent lexical items in Slovene and English, revealing the potential of this approach 
for further studies of semantic prosody.
The present volume would not have been possible without the support of a number of 
individuals. We wish to thank the journal editors, Dr Smiljana Komar and Dr Mojca Krevel, 
who kindly accommodated our proposal for a special issue of ELOPE on translation; the 
contributors for the timely submissions of their revised papers; and the many anonymous 
colleagues for their thorough peer reviews. Last but not least, we would like to thank Dr 
Andrej Stopar, the journal’s Technical Editor, for his continuous support in the editing 
process. All of the above deserve credit for the scholarly merits of the volume, while the 
pleasure shall remain ours.
Nataša Hirci, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Agnes Pisanski Peterlin, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Simon Zupan, University of Maribor, Slovenia
Guest editors of ELOPE, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2021)
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