Reine MEYLAERTS, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; E-Mail

The EST Newsletter is published twice a year, in May and November. It is basically a vehicle for communication between EST Members and a catalyst for action rather than a traditional Translation journal. It provides information on EST activities (see also the EST website: http://www.est-translationstudies.org) and on research events and presents queries and suggestions on EST matters and on T&I research issues. If you have a question or request regarding Translation studies, do not hesitate to send it to the Newsletter for publication, as one of the other readers may have the information or answer you are looking for. Comments and suggestions from readers are welcome. All correspondence to:

Reine MEYLAERTS, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; e-mail:

or to Barbara AHRENS, FASK der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, An der Hochschule 2, 76726 Germersheim, Germany; e-mail:

Editorial

Dear Members,

It has been a busy summer for EST. If you are among those who were not able to take part personally in one of our activities, we hope you this issue of the Newsletter will keep you fully informed.

We had a one-day symposium on ‘Publishing in TS’ in Ghent. This will be followed by a symposium on ‘Supervision and Research Skills Acquisition: How to Improve Research Standards?’ next year in Ljubljana. Preparations for the EST Congress in Ljubljana have already started and will be continuing throughout the year.

Thanks to a lot of active members, previous activities like the Young Scholar Award, the Summer School Scholarship will be maintained. New initiatives such as the Literature Grant and participation in setting up a European Citation Index in Humanities were launched. We also hope to initiate very soon a website platform on the “Bologna process”. It will contain the English translation of programs that have been approved or are in the process of being approved. The information on comparable programs might be helpful for others and can lead to a discussion forum and a better integration of programs.

New doctoral theses and books came out, and a lot of interesting conferences are coming up in 2006. Some of them are announced in this Newsletter, others have been or will be sent out by email. Do not forget to visit our website regularly at http://www.est-translationstudies.org. Supplementing the Newsletter, its aim is to provide a constant source of information and a forum for interactivity. It is only thanks to the cooperation and interactivity of the whole EST community that EST can grow. So please, do not stop sending us your contributions, reports, information and questions.

Let’s remain active because we all benefit.

Reine Meylaerts and Barbara Ahrens

Giving out TS information as an institutional strategy

Information is often seen as an asset to be used to prepare action in a competitive environment: the idea is to have more/better information than competitors and use it to gain some sort of advantage over them. In TS, information about research activity and findings is essential to the work of individual researchers, but is difficult to come by for many. Should it be considered a commodity, to be kept as an asset by those who have it and only traded for some kind of profit, as in the marketplace?

For obvious reasons, such an attitude is legitimate from publishers and from journal editors. However, we believe that it is counter-productive in individuals, in universities and in learned societies such as EST, and that they can only stand to gain from offering TS information to all:

· When it is given out to others, it is still available to the giver and can be used for its/his/her research.

· Givers are identified as sources of information, and therefore as resource persons/bodies with some TS competence and good will. This facilitates contacts and sets the ground for future cooperation, as the example of the CIRIN network (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/daniel.gile) has shown over the years.

· At this stage of the development of TS, by giving out information to the community, givers help significantly to improve the quality of TS studies. There are now far less published papers expressing their authors’ views without referring to relevant existing research than 15 or 20 years ago, and this has probably much to do with better circulation of information. By making more information accessible to colleagues, TS information givers make it more likely that colleagues will take this information on board in their own work, or be criticized for not doing so by peer reviewers.

Giving out information is a win-win strategy and is worth some effort. By the end of this year, on its website www.est-translationstudies.org, EST will have provided information on more than 100 recent publications, including theses and dissertations, which can be accessed worldwide through the internet. We should like to

Daniel Gile and Gyde Hansen

NEW DISCOUNT OFFERS

I. Access to TSB

John Benjamins makes an exclusive offer to EST members: one year access to the Translation Studies Bibliography, private use only, for 50 Euro!

EST members will soon receive an email message, detailing the precise modalities of this exceptional offer.

II. Rodopi

Editions Rodopi offers a 30% discount to members of EST if they order direct from Rodopi by email , or by fax to +31 (0) 20 4472979; reference EST with all orders.

Please visit the EST website at est-translationstudies.org for the link that connects you directly to the Rodopi website.

EST ACTIVITIES

I. TS Literature Grant 2006

Applications are invited for the EST TS Literature Grant for 2006. Please read and follow the guidelines on the relevant EST web site page: www.est-translationstudies. org, and do not forget to indicate the name and full address of a contact person. The applications should be sent electronically and as hard copy by February 1, 2006 to Nike K. Pokorn, Faculty of Arts, Askerceva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, SLOVENIA, e-mail:

II. EST Congress 2007

The 2007 Ljubljana Congress (3-5 September 2007) theme will be:

Why TS Matters

TS in its modern form as a distinct inter-discipline has been in existence for several decades. We now have a number of specialized journals, hundreds of scholars who meet often for conferences, many theses, dissertations and academic positions. Clearly, TS matters to those who are engaged in it, be it because they find it fascinating as a scholarly activity, because it is part of their academic career, or for other reasons. But does it matter to others? Does it, for example, add value to practitioners of translation, by teaching them something useful and allowing them to enhance their translation skills, or perhaps by enhancing their status in society? Does it contribute to translator training by offering useful training methods, assessment criteria or other elements? Does it matter to other academic communities by contributing new knowledge and new methods from the realm of translation? Does it matter to society at large, for instance by showing what impact translation-related phenomena have had on various communities? Are some effects of TS still to come? Which, how and when?

Contributions could address these important questions under many angles, for example by discussing the relations between TS and the practice of translation and/or between TS and translator training, by performing sociological analysis of the groups involved, by examining the relationship between TS and immigration policies, the links between TS and new forms of electronic literacy, focusing on particular theories, on research methods and on paradigms, by reporting on personal experiences as scholars, students, trainers.

The first circular will be sent out in May 2006. Further information will also be available on the website.

III. European Science Foundation (ESF):

Building a European Citation Index in Humanities (ECIH)

The possibility of fostering the setting up of an ECIH at the European level has been repeatedly discussed by the ESF.

In October 2000, the ESF’s Standing Committee for the Humanities collected opinions on what basic criteria would be used to evaluate the research productivity of researchers and research teams. An evaluation in terms of bibliometrics was suggested but the European situation in this respect (and in the Humanities) was unsatisfactory. The database, which exists, contrary to the SCI (Science Citation Index) used for natural sciences, answers neither the needs nor the standards required by the European research in the fields of the Humanities. The best Journals and Research Journals in languages other than English are rarely included. Moreover, books (monographs, collection of papers) should also be taken into consideration.

In order to improve the situation, the ESF decided to launch a project aiming at the compilation of a European database of scholarly journals and books, discipline by discipline, in the domain of the Humanities. Various meetings took place in 2001 to outline the whole project. In the meantime, the ESF plan (2002-2006) was approved: actions in the field of research infrastructures, such as building an ECIH, were included among the new ESF priorities.

In 2002, member organisations (MOs) were asked to propose lists of journals, discipline by discipline, and according to a grading system:

· A: high-ranking international publications, with a very strong reputation and regularly cited;

· B: standard international publications, with a good reputation;

· C: scientific publications with an important local significance, and occasionally cited outside the publishing country.

All the publications must fulfil international standards (citation techniques, referee system, etc.)

MOs had to decide themselves on the forms and ways of compiling the required lists.

The discipline directory did not include Translation Studies (TS) which was only a subcategory of Linguistics.

In October 2003, the EST Board sent a letter to the ESF Head of the Humanities Unit (Ms E.Vestesgaard) and to the three members of the working group set up by the ESF’s Standing Committee (in French to MM Alain Peyraube and Ferenc Kiefer and in Finnish to Arto Mustajoki). In our letters, we emphasized our interest in and good will toward the project, suggesting a provisional list of 10 journals in our field. (see below)

We never received any feedback, but we were aware that EST was not representative of a single country, while the procedure was to ask every country (national level) to provide lists of reference Journals and later lists of books. On the other hand, we were also aware that the project was open – using the expertise of authoritative representatives of the academic community, consulting the researchers of a given community, requesting comments about the classification of the different disciplines listed, etc.

We strongly believed and still believe that an ECIH could give TS more recognition, more visibility, more legitimacy, even though quantitative criteria are not the only criteria in the strength and quality of an interdiscipline like ours.

The European Area Research (European Union) is also working on the Humanities Citation Index.

Andrew Chesterman – former EST Board member (1998-2004) – has been asked (Summer 2004) to join the Linguistics panel for the ECIH (one of about 15 within the Humanities). This may be the outcome of our letters.

1. The panel met on November 11-12, 2005 in Strasbourg. Any comments and suggestions, proposals for additions to the list of Journals can be sent directly to Andrew Chesterman.

2. Are there any translation schools that have been contacted by their authorities (University, ESF national member, etc.) about the ESF project?

3. If so, what were the suggestions about ranking TS Journals?

The project is a good opportunity to strengthen the academic and scientific position of TS. EST must support it and determine a strategy to support our field at the European level. By answering the questions, you can help the whole TS community. Thank you.

Yves Gambier and Andrew Chesterman

E-Mail:

LIST of TS journals (in alphabetical order):

Across Languages and Cultures

Babel

The Interpreters’ Newsletter

Interpreting