The past, present and future of Chinese MA theses in Interpreting Studies: A scientometric survey
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Science Policy, Statistics, Computational Science
- Keywords
- statistics, scientometrics, MA theses, Chinese Interpreting Studies
- Copyright
- © 2015 Xu
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. The past, present and future of Chinese MA theses in Interpreting Studies: A scientometric survey. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e958v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.958v1
Abstract
This paper takes a scientometric approach to examining one of Chinese Interpreting Studies’ (CIS) most productive sources of research, MA theses, with the aim of answering the following questions: How has the discipline changed over time? What fields and theories influence it? And what are its most common research themes? The study’s comprehensive corpus of nearly 1,300 Chinese-language theses addresses a data-based limitation faced by earlier scholars. A range of state-of-the-art statistical techniques have made it possible to detect patterns in CIS that are difficult to tease out by human hand and eye alone. The field has grown rapidly in recent years and is now producing a steady and consistent stream of research: the majority of students in China draw inspiration from theories within Translation Studies, but no particular theories or topics have grown more popular over time. Despite this consistency, CIS remains a complex and dynamic field of academic enquiry.
Author Comment
This is a submission to Perspectives: Studies in Translatology.