Beyond individual mastery

Research on expertise in translation studies has largely focused on the skills and performance of individual translators. However, a growing body of research demonstrates that translation practices are collaborative and embedded in complex socio-material environments. In this article, we outline how expertise research in translation studies can be enriched by adopting perspectives from socio-cognitive approaches and from research on distributed, team, and organizational expertise in other disciplines. Drawing on ethnographic data, we analyze how expertise is enacted, coordinated, and recognized across actors, artifacts, and organizational structures. The insights regarding the distributedness of translation expertise are summarized along five dimensions: (1) sharing identities, (2) acting as a social unit, (3) learning as a social unit, (4) interweaving material affordances, and (5) realigning processes. Thus, we aim to advance the conceptualization of translation expertise beyond notions of individual mastery and to open up new directions for empirical research.