A Document Co-Citation Analysis of the Translation and Interpreting Research

Translation and Interpreting studies (TIS) have been under continuous expansion in the 21st century, due to the growing demand for translation and interpreting professionals in the market. However, the developmental trends and patterns of TIS have not been identified in pedagogical or academic research. This study provides a retrospective review of TIS in the past two decades with a document co-citation analysis which was conducted on 2847 journal articles published between January 2000 and March 2020 in 13 major TIS journals indexed in Scopus.
A co-citation analysis was conducted and 25 discrete research clusters were identified including news translation, understanding legal interpreter, translation curriculum, and post-editing quality etc. A cluster view and a timeline view were presented, providing visualization of the weight and how these clusters have evolved through time. A burst detection technique was used to identify the most influential publications in the field. The results showed that 20 books and journal articles were the most frequently cited in this field. Moreover, a quantitative analysis including temporal metrics and structural metrics confirmed the robustness and reliability of the generated network.
Based on the findings, we extensively discussed how the observed trends in each cluster would contribute to further developments in TIS. Implications for instruction, research, and theory of TIS are discussed and some methodological guidelines are presented for future research.