The primary aim of this book is to explore how digital research methods can be
adopted in translation studies (TS) research. Digital research methods have been
defined elsewhere as “the use of online and digital technologies to collect and
analyse research data” (Snee et al. 2016, 1). This book uses this definition as its
foundation, but it also expands upon it to encompass the use of online and digital
technologies not only to collect and analyze research data, but also to visualize it.
These three stages of the research process form the basic structure of the book, as
will be discussed shortly.
Thus, this book will examine the strengths, limitations, and ethical concerns of
adopting digital research methods specifically for translation studies. It will also
highlight existing translation studies projects that rely on digital research methods
and discuss research projects that could be undertaken in the future with the tools
and approaches presented in the book.
A secondary aim of this book is to forge stronger links between digital humanities and translation studies research. Digital humanities (DH) is an emerging mode
of scholarship for “collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged
research, teaching and publication” (Burdick et al. 2012, 122). While not a unified
field, DH is “an array of convergent practices” that focus on producing and disseminating knowledge in mediums other than just print (Burdick et al. 2012, 122).
Whereas early DH efforts focused on textual analysis, more contemporary efforts
attempt to expand the limits of archives to include digital works and to apply
existing DH methodologies and approaches to the study of “born-digital materials,” such as e-literature and interactive fiction (Berry 2012, 4). Two primary
features characterize digital humanities: a decreased focus on print as a medium, with a preference for multimedia and multimodality, and a focus on examining
human culture through experimental and established computational methods and
approaches (Tanasescu 2021, 33).
Digital humanities has been of particular interest to fields such as literary studies (e.g. Hoover, Culpeper, and Kieran 2014) and history (e.g. Graham, Milligan,
and Weingart 2016; Graham et al. 2022). In fact, digital humanities scholarship
has tended, until very recently, to have been carried out largely in fields such as
history, literary and cultural heritage, and library and information science, and
largely in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Germany (Tanasescu 2021, 33–34). While
translation studies scholarship has only recently explicitly linked digital humanities and translation studies (e.g. Wakabayashi 2019; St André 2018; Bowker 2021;
Tanasescu 2021), translation studies researchers have a long history of using digital
tools to analyze, visualize, and present translation-related research. Corpus-based
approaches were introduced in translation studies literature more than 30 years ago
(e.g. Baker 1995), network graphing software has been used for translation-related
visualizations for more than a decade (e.g. Sapiro and Bustamante 2009; CastroPrieto and Olvera Lobo 2007), born-digital materials, such as websites, blogs,
online social media, discussion forums, and electronic literature have been of interest to translation studies for many years (e.g. Plassard 2007), and examples of online
translation-related databases and online archives of digital or digitized works can
be found going back several decades (e.g. Río 2002; Grant and Mezei 2004).
Despite a rich history of translation studies and digital technologies intersecting,
and of translation studies researchers incorporating digital humanities approaches,
such as combining translation studies methodologies with computational tools,
there is still room for other intersections between digital humanities and translation
studies. For instance, geographic information systems (GIS) software (Chapter 11)
has not been used extensively to visually explore geographic references in translated works or geographic networks of translation publishers, while computational
approaches such as geoparsing (Chapter 5), sentiment analysis (Chapter 6), and
automated image analysis (Chapter 7) seem under-represented in TS research. This
does not mean, however, that digital tools and approaches are suitable for every
project, nor that tools should be adopted uncritically: as Greenhalgh et al. (2018,
506) suggest, scholars who are weighing the advantages of incorporating digital
methods into their research practices should “consider a continuum of options” and
then select those that best support their research goals and the context in which the
research will be carried out. For this reason, each chapter in this book includes a discussion of the ethical and methodological concerns that should be taken into account
when considering whether and how to best adopt the various tools and approaches.