Translation Studies – Interdisciplinary, Multidisciplinary or Transdisciplinary?

The aim of the paper is to discuss the concept of interdisciplinarity as a fundamental paradigm of modern research, presenting some of its characteristics as well as some problems arising in connection with it. The notion of interdisciplinarity (as well as those of multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity) will be examined in the context of the development of Translation Studies as an autonomous discipline, which formed out of linguistics, literary studies and some other fields, and which is today considered of eminently interdisciplinary nature. The fundamental question to be addressed is the relationship between the new interdiscipline and the disciplines from which it has derived, and its autonomy with regard to those disciplines. Taking into account practical as well as epistemological circumstances which favoured the rise of Translation Studies, the presentation will go on to explore in particular the nature of the relationship between the study of language and the study of translation, emphasizing the ambivalent role played by linguistics (and philology) in the advancement of the new research field, on the one hand hindering its development and marginalizing its relevance, while on the other hand actually making it possible as a result of some fresh discourse-oriented approaches to the study of language and of new insights into its functioning in texts, which gradually became available from the 1960’s on. It will be suggested that to a significant degree the study of language and the study of translation continue to be inextricably linked – so much so that the customary disciplinary divisions appear to be relatively arbitrary and motivated by pragmatic reasons rather than justified by the inherent nature of the research object.