International Translation Studies From 2014 to 2018: A Bibliometric Analysis and Its Implications

Introduction Rovira-Esteva, Orero, and Franco Aixela estimate that, over the past twenty years, more than 60,000 publications—including books, journals, academic theses, and so on—have been produced in translation studies alone. Moreover, the field has seen growing research on using different approaches borrowed from linguistics and other disciplines. However, the bibliometric approach has been rarely adopted in translation studies. Most of these bibliometric studies focus narrowly on certain aspects of translation studies (e.g., Franco Aixela and Rovira-Esteva on the quality of translation studies publications, Martínez-Gómez on nonprofessional interpreting, Zhou and Sun on translation history, and Echeverri on several versions of translations studies). Conversely, other studies are concerned more closely with how the general developmental trends and foci of translation studies develop. For example, Doorslaer and Gambier studied geographical distribution and the five most frequent keywords from selected journals through the database of the online Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB). Zanettin, Saldanha and Harding investigated research interests and foci using data between 1997 and 2011 from the Translation Studies Abstracts (TSA) online database. Liang and Xu analyzed articles published from 2009 to 2013 in eight SSCI-indexed translation journals from the Web of Science online database to reveal development trends and the leading edge of translation studies. These studies analyzing some aspects or developmental trends in translation studies are significant. Although methodologically sound and thorough, they focused principally on Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI-indexed) translation journals, leaving Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI-indexed) translation journals almost completely unexplored. This is likely due to the absence of their impact factor based on the ISI Web of Knowledge or other channels. Another likely reason for the oversight of some A&HCI-indexed translation journals is their shorter history as research-oriented journals compared with that of SSCI-indexed translation journals. Furthermore, the previous studies collected data mainly through the Web of Science, TSB, or TSA databases, neglecting the other databases. Another limitation of the aforementioned studies is that they paid little attention to exploring the underlying reasons for the high academic