Among the most important roles of theory in the humanities is the creation of fresh perspectives. Probing a new angle defamiliarises the familiar and leads to novel questions. My paper explores the potential offered by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems for an understanding of translation in its social and historical context. The theory is abstract and general, and we need to begin by introducing some of its basic concepts and terms (communication; code; programme; autopoiesis; operational closure; differentiation; structural coupling; observation and second-order observation). I then go on to survey individual aspects of translation that can be redescribed in social systems terms. The paper defines translation as proxy and resemblance, addresses the internal differentiation of translation in the modern world, explains the idea of the form of translation and the significance of intertextuality in this regard, casts translation as second-order observation, and suggests ways in which social systems theory can focus attention with reference to translation history.

The field of expertise studies in cognitive psychology proposes that expert performance in cognitive skill domains such as chess, computer programming, or systems analysis is enabled by distinctive cognitive resources that allow “consistently superior performance on a specified set of representative tasks for the domain that can be administered to any subject” (Ericsson and Charness 1997). These resources are accumulated within the framework of deliberate practice, engagement in regular activities that are specially designed to improve performance. The cognitive resources that underlie expertise arise from the operation of pattern recognition, problem representation, “chunking”, schematization and knowledge proceduralization processes on the contents of episodic memory over long periods of deliberate practice. The cognitive changes that characterize expertise are held to be consistent across domains. If this is the case, we should expect translation experts to exhibit some of the same cognitive characteristics as experts in other fields. We should be able to both identify and quantify cases of deliberate translation practice and record their effects. Research methods used in expertise studies to verify claims of cognitive changes during novice to expert development should be replicable in translation research. Looking at the expertise studies literature and its findings could provide new directions for research for those interested in translation competence and its relationship to the poorly defined notion of translation expertise. Thus, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for situating translation expertise within empirical translation studies.

Baker’s (1993) earliest paper on the potential of corpus-based translation studies argued that corpora would provide an empirical basis for descriptive translation studies. Since then corpora have been used principally in the investigation of “universal” (or, more tentatively, “general”) features of translation, on the one hand, and in the study of the specific styles of individual translators, on the other. A number of extensive case studies have now been conducted, and advances in corpus-based methodologies have been made, but it is not altogether clear what corpora have added to our understanding of basic theoretical constructs in translation studies. Has the quantitative shift led to a qualitative shift, as Tognini-Bonelli (1996) has argued in the case of linguistics in general? In this paper I aim to investigate whether or not our understanding of aspects of our object of enquiry has shifted in any way after a decade of using corpora in translation studies. Taking such concepts as the unit of translation, equivalence, and the translator’s voice as examples, I ask whether exposure to more data, and new ways of looking at this data, have led us to rethink or refine any of these concepts.

Taking a “skopos-oriented” approach to translation means that translators choose their translation strategies according to the purpose or function that the translated text is intended to fulfil for the target audience. Communicative purposes can only be achieved under certain conditions, such as culture-specific knowledge presuppositions, value systems or behaviour conventions. Therefore, the translator will have to analyse the target-culture conditions for which the translation is needed (as specified in the translation brief) in order to decide whether, and how, any source-text purposes can work for the target audience according to the specifications of the brief. If the target-culture conditions differ from those of the source culture, there are two basic options: either to transform the text in such a way that it can work under target-culture conditions, or to replace the source-text functions with their respective meta-functions. The paper will explore how these two options relate to translation typologies.

Research on texts as units larger than sentences has a rich tradition in translation studies. The notion of context, its relation to text, and the role it plays in translation has, however, received much less attention. In this paper, I have made a fresh attempt at conceptualising the relationship between context and text for translation and presented a new theory of re-contextualisation that explicates the relationship between context and text in its design and its categorial scheme. A growing influence which may threaten traditional processes of re-contextualisation in translation, i.e. the increasing influence of English as a global lingua franca on translation and on addressee expectation norms in other language communities and cultures, is also discussed.

The monolingual ideology of the United States implies a society that integrates all languages and cultures into one inclusive, monolingual culture. That which does not fit is relegated to the margins, left-over, or left out. In this paper I argue that the two are not mutually exclusive: monolingualism always includes multilingualism, albeit deceptively, because it hides the very multilingual fabric upon which it rests. I look at the multilingual fabric of the United States, focusing on periods of colonization and immigration, showing strong traditions of multiple languages and translation. I then turn to Derrida’s (1998) Monolingualism of the Other in which he discusses the impossible-forbidden, presence-absence of translation in any monolingual culture. In terms of translation theory, the kind of translation Derrida discusses is not the conventional, interlingual, type, but another, partially “mad”, quasi-schizophrenic, psycho-social kind of translation that underlies any given cultural condition. I then turn to China and give a few initial impressions of how such a psycho-social definition of translation might apply. I suggest that such research on how translation operates in and among multiple language communities may reveal more about culture in United States and/or China than more traditional translation theories.

Recent shifts of focus within media studies, literary and cultural studies are promising, finally, to give translation a significant role in the analysis of cultural objects and to confirm translation studies as an area of inquiry whose explorations at the intersection are uniquely productive. My aim in this paper is to examine the translator’s plot as it is enacted in fiction (in the novel, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, 2004), but also to show in what timid ways the translator plot is now also emerging in the area of cultural theory in relation to the idea of circulation. In contrast to other contexts, like Canada or India, American cultural and literary theory has traditionally been indifferent to questions of language, and so the new visibility of translation within these fields is a development whose implications merit attention. To pair up developments in American theory with a novel focusing on the Indian context is to conjugate two modes of visibility, which share significant commonalities.