People were thinking seriously about translation long before anyone thought of studying it. Cicero, defending his renderings of the Attic orators, already distinguished between translating ut interpres and ut orator — word for word, or sense for sense. Jerome wrestled with the same dilemma in his letter to Pammachius; Luther defended his German Bible against pedants with characteristic vigour; Schleiermacher, in 1813, gave us the still-canonical alternative between moving the reader towards the author or the author towards the reader; and Walter Benjamin turned the whole question into metaphysics. Reflection on translation, in other words, is as old as translation itself. What it was not, for most of its history, was a discipline.
The discipline came later. And it is worth remembering how recently. It was only after the Second World War, in the intellectual ferment that also produced modern linguistics, information theory, and semiotics, that translation became an object of systematic inquiry. Roman Jakobson’s famous 1959 essay on the linguistic aspects of translation, with its tripartition of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation, placed the phenomenon at the very heart of how signs work. When James S. Holmes sketched “the name and nature of translation studies” in 1972, he was naming something that already existed in embryo: a field interested in understanding translation: what it is, how it works, why it takes the forms it does. Interpreting followed the same path a little later, and always somewhat in translation’s shadow, as Franz Pöchhacker has documented. The founding gesture of the discipline, in both cases, was epistemic. Translation and interpreting were phenomena to be explained, like language itself.
The professional turn
Then something changed. From the 1970s or 1980s onwards, the discipline took what we might call — by analogy with the “cultural turn” that Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere proclaimed in the same years: a professional turn. Globalisation, European integration, the expansion of international organisations and of the language industry created something new: the translator and the interpreter as mass professional figures, with markets, rates, associations, codes of ethics, and training pathways. And the discipline reorganised itself around them.
Nobody decreed this reorientation; it followed from who was doing the research. The researchers who drove this turn were, to a remarkable extent, practitioners themselves. Danica Seleskovitch, the founding figure of interpreting research in Paris, was a conference interpreter first and a theorist second — and her théorie du sens was, quite explicitly, a professional self-description elevated to theory. Daniel Gile coined the term “practisearchers” for this hybrid figure, and the term stuck because it described almost everyone in the room. These scholars typically did not come from philology departments or from the classical humanities. They came from the professional schools of translation and interpreting, institutions often housed inside universities but never entirely of them, with a frankly vocational character: Geneva, Paris, Trieste, Germersheim, Monterey. The links with professional associations — AIIC, FIT, the national bodies — were dense and personal. Many researchers were members; conferences were co-organised; the boundary between studying the profession and representing it was, let us say, porous.
The result was a discipline whose object of study quietly shifted. Officially, we studied translation and interpreting. In practice, a very large share of the field studied translators and interpreters: their cognitive load, their working conditions, their status, their training, their ergonomics, their rates, their professional identity. Anthony Pym’s work on the sociology of translators, or the entire research programme on “translator status” and on curriculum design, are emblematic. None of this was illegitimate. Much of it was excellent. But it tied the fortunes of the discipline to the fortunes of a profession. And professions, as Andrew Abbott taught us in The System of Professions, are not eternal. Even less when transformational technologies, such as AI, enter the scene, as Daniel and Richard Susskind remind us in The Future of the Professions. They are historical formations that rise and fall with the jurisdictions they manage to claim.
The decline of the object
Here is the uncomfortable part, and I will state it as soberly as I can. The professions of translation and interpreting are in decline, and there are good reasons to believe that we are approaching their obsolescence as mass occupations. This does not mean there will be no translators or interpreters at all. There will be — in high-stakes legal settings, in literary translation, in diplomacy, in contexts where accountability, liability, or artistry demand a human in the loop, as I argued in Interpreting without Intelligence. Rethinking Agency in Multilingual Communication. But their numbers will shrink so dramatically that the institutional ecosystem built around them cannot survive in its current form. Machine translation crossed the threshold of everyday adequacy years ago; large language models have now crossed the threshold of expert adequacy for a widening range of text types and, increasingly, for speech. The market signals are unambiguous: falling volumes for human translation, collapsing rates, declining enrolments.
The consequences for our training institutions, the place where most of translation and interpreting studies resides, follow with a certain grim logic. Most schools whose raison d’être is the training of professional translators and interpreters will disappear, or will have to refocus their curricula so thoroughly — towards language technology, towards intercultural consulting, towards post-editing and quality assurance, towards whatever comes next — that they will no longer be recognisable as what they were. Some are already doing so, with more or less lucidity.
And the discipline? Here we must be honest about what the professional turn actually did to us. If a large part of Translation and Interpreting Studies took the professional as its object — and translation only incidentally, as the thing the professional happened to do — then the disappearance of the object entails the decline of the research programme. The number of scholars interested in the professional translator will wane, not because of censorship or fashion, but for the same reason no one launches a research programme on the professional sociology of travel agents: the object is leaving the historical stage, surviving only in the niches where complexity still demands a human. The conferences will thin out. The journals devoted to translator training and professional practice will merge, narrow, or close. The associations that sustained the practisearcher model will lose the membership base that sustained them.
A new Paradigm for a renewed Discipline
What remains is what was there at the beginning: translation and interpreting as phenomena. And here, paradoxically, the prospects are not bleak at all. Interest in translation — in what it is for meaning to cross languages, modalities, and now kinds of agents — will continue, and may well increase, as I pointed out in Towards a Technological Turn in Interpreting Studies. The rise of non-human translation agents does not close the question of translation; it reopens it in the most dramatic way since Jakobson. What does it mean that a statistical artefact with no biography, no intentions in any classical sense, and no membership in a linguistic community produces translations that competent bilinguals accept? What becomes of concepts like equivalence, norms, agency, or ethics when the agent is not a person? These are not questions for a vocational school. They are questions for a classical university — for the kind of institution where translation once sat, before the professional turn, alongside philosophy of language, semiotics, and philology.
That, I suspect, is where the field is heading: back to the Wissenschaft and away from the Berufskunde. The discipline that emerged after the war to understand a human practice will survive by becoming, once again, a discipline that understands a practice — no longer exclusively human. The professional turn will be remembered as what it was: a turn. Turns end. The road continues.
The consolation, for those of us inside the institutions, is that universities change slowly — slowly enough to give us time to adapt. The question is whether we will use it to defend the profession we studied, or to return to the question that made it a discipline in the first place. The generation now entering the field would do well to notice which questions have a future. The sociology of a vanishing profession is legitimate, as history. The nature of translation, performed by whatever agent performs it, is legitimate as science. Holmes named our discipline for its object, not for its practitioners. Half a century later, that choice of name may turn out to be what saves it.