Multilingual mediated communication and cognition

We believe that the present book represents a clear illustration of the vectors of change that have driven research in this area since the previous volume came out nearly ten years ago. In the following, we shall identify and describe these vectors of change and development, linking them to the specific chapters in the volume that serve to illustrate them. But first, it is necessary to provide a short rationale for our choice of terminology and title. Blame it on the new technologies. It is already commonplace that computers and the Internet have turned the professions of translators and interpreters inside out. The changes go well beyond new capabilities and excellent new tools and resources, including machine translation (MT). These developments impact the ways people behave and even the ways they use their abilities, cognitive and otherwise, when performing one of the tasks under study within the umbrella term of translation studies. This rapidly evolving reality has also brought with it some new labels, such as localization, internationalization, project management, language brokering, remote interpreting, and transcreation. Sometimes, the new reality requiring a label emerged so quickly that the terms chosen are less than transparent, such as respeaking, and sometimes the new reality disappeared almost as quickly, as in the case of pre-editing. Sometimes, the same terms are used about a less-than-stable reality or referent.