Globalization and the politics of translation studies

Abstract

Globalization can be seen as a consequence of technologies reducing the costs of communication. This reduction has led both to the rise of English as the international lingua franca and to an increase in the global demand for translations. The simultaneous movement on both fronts is explained by the divergent communication strategies informing the production and distribution of information, where translation can only be expected to remain significant for distribution, and not for production. The fundamental change in the resulting communication patterns is the emergence of one-to-many document production processes, which are displacing the traditional source-target models still used in Trans..