“It’s the economy, stupid”: discussing the translator’s business against the background of a changing techno-economic landscape

Authors

  • Peter Sandrini University of Innsbruck

Abstract

This paper starts by discussing the economic impacts of technology and automation on translators’ activities. It then proposes a model to account for the depreciation of skills and respective economic consequences caused by technological changes, described as the translators' ‘obsolescence cycle’. This highlights the need for translators to adapt and reconfigure their expertise in order to accompany these changing circumstances, something that can be done by shifting the focus of their activities away from production towards more managerial responsibilities, including advisory, supervisory and planning functions. On a broader scale, management and the organisation of translation converge in the concept of translation policy, a still under-researched topic, which could prove to be a potentially rewarding field of action for translators.
KEYWORDS: Translation Business, Organization, Management, Productivity, Efficiency, Translator’s Expertise, Translation Policy

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Published

2022-12-31