Professionals’ views on the concepts of translation: the challenge of categorisation

In this article, we analyse and discuss translation professionals’ views on the concepts of their trade: the concept of translation itself but also adjacent notions such as subtitling, interpreting, localisation and transcreation. Through focus groups with translators and translation project managers working for a translation agency, we explore how practitioners understand the concepts of translation, how they categorise and why they categorise as they do. Data were analysed by means of prototype theory, and results show that the focus-group participants understand prototypical translation rather narrowly as source-text oriented, written, interlingual transfer, but also that they have a broad and nuanced understanding of translation as a category. Beyond the prototype, they use ‘translation’ as a cover term for a wide variety of tasks that involve different degrees of intervention, transformation and creativity. Interestingly, the analyses show that the practitioners in the study categorise quite differently than translation scholars do. They draw on a fluctuating set of criteria for categorisation, some of which are highly pragmatic (e.g. pricing), and their definitions are much more floating and context-sensitive. In fact, they operate with different concepts depending on whom they interact with: clients, colleagues – or scholars.