Practices and attitudes toward replication in empirical translation and interpreting studies

Christian Olalla-Soler
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

This article presents the results of three studies on practices in and attitudes toward replication in empirical translation and interpreting studies. The first study reports on a survey in which 52 researchers in translation and interpreting with experience in empirical research answered questions about their practices in and attitudes toward replication. The survey data were complemented by a bibliometric study of publications indexed in the Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation (BITRA) (Franco Aixelá 2001–2019) that explicitly stated in the title or abstract that they were derived from a replication. In a second bibliometric study, a conceptual replication of Yeung’s (2017) study on the acceptance of replications in neuroscience journals was conducted by analyzing 131 translation and interpreting journals. The article aims to provide evidence-based arguments for initiating a debate about the need for replication in empirical translation and interpreting studies and its implications for the development of the discipline.

Publication history

Date received: 29 November 2018

Date accepted: 16 November 2019

Published online: 19 December 2019

Table of contents

This article presents the results obtained in a series of studies aiming to describe the practices and attitudes of researchers conducting empirical studies in the field of translation and interpreting studies (TIS) regarding replication. Replication is defined as the repetition of the methods that led to a reported finding (Schmidt 2009).

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