Julie McDonough Dolmaya, PhD, C.Tr. (ATIO)Assistant Professor | Professeure adjointeSchool of Translation | École de traductionYork University, Glendon Campus | Université York, Campus Glendon
Blogs have been popular with translators for more than a decade, and in that time, translation studies research has attempted to learn more about the profiles and motivations of translators who blog. Previous studies have suggested that translators build online communities through their blogs and that certain bloggers function as “stars” within this community (Dam 2013: 28-9), but to date, no research has specifically examined how these communities are constructed or what characteristics they might share. We lack a means of fully assessing the size of the translation blogosphere and an understanding of the range of actors who are connected to translation blogs. We do not know, for instance, how often non-blogging translators are part of blog networks, how strong the ties between the various translation blogs are, and which translation blogs are most influential.
This presentation has two aims: first, to discuss how we might start to map out the network of translation blogs and, second, to explore the challenges inherent in any such mapping task. I will describe my efforts to create a database that categorizes translation and interpreting blogs and their content. Then, to better illustrate how the database could be used in the future to help map the blogosphere, I will discuss some sample translation blog networks generated with the graph visualization and manipulation program Gephi. These social network maps offer us a means of analyzing the connections between translation bloggers, non-blogging translators, and other actors and can therefore help us better understand what the translation blogosphere actually looks like.