Discussion
Is Translation Studies too much about translation? A reply to Jan Blommaert

Michael Boyden
KULeuven, Belgium
Table of contents

Jan Blommaert’s rejoinder to the special issue of Target on “Heterolingualism in/and translation” (volume 18:1 [2006]), guest-edited by Reine Meylaerts, has provided us with a stimulating incentive to enter into what he himself tags a “transdisciplinary dialogue” regarding the role of translation in an increasingly diversified world society. I am of the opinion that Blommaert’s somewhat polemical attempt at an “indexical conversion” of the theory and method of Translation Studies from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis, or at least his ethnographically inspired version of it, poses an interesting and no doubt necessary challenge to the field as it exists today. My aim in this short rejoinder to the rejoinder is to pick up some of the leads that Blommaert has thrown out and reflect on their usefulness for the discipline of Translation Studies at the start of the twenty-first century.

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