Current FWF research project: Rethinking translation expertise: a workplace study (Retrex, P33132)

The objective of this research project is to contribute to an understanding of how translation expertise is understood and constructed by working professionals. The project explores the lived translation expertise of working professionals, which is assumed to differ from the established perspectives of translation process research. To do so, the project views experts as social actors who construct expertise in interaction with other social actors and tools. Accordingly, the social, performative and situative aspects of expertise are placed in the foreground. The project investigates how translation expertise is socially constructed and rationalized in the workplace, which notions of expertise emerge and how these manifest themselves in day-to-day working life. This includes questions of possible contradictions between what people say they do and what they actually do, the strategic interests that underlie the expertise discourse and potential conflicts between different constructions of expertise. The empirical insights into the lived expertise of working professionals will offer new perspectives for translation studies and prove fruitful for theoretical reconceptualizations.

This research project takes the form of a translation workplace study and approaches the topic froma qualitative, ethnographic perspective. To capture the emic, insider perspective of the participants as closely as possible, the project uses an ethnographically oriented multi-case research design with a deep, multi-faceted analysis of a number of selected translation agencies. To grasp the different dimensions of lived expertise (actual workplace praxis, rationalizations of the social actors involved, normative descriptions), a combination of participant observations, interviews, focus groups and document analysis will be used to collect the data.