A Window into the Profession

Abstract When translators, academics and other language professionals blog about translation, their posts describe working conditions, emerging technologies, ethical challenges and other aspects of the profession, indicating how translation is evolving and how translators are working in the 21st century. To illustrate how such blogs can be used by scholars of translation to better understand translator practices and attitudes, this paper uses content analysis to explore a convenience sample of 50 blogs, randomly selected from a pool of translation blogs active between January and June 2009. Some characteristics of the bloggers are discussed, including how they self-identify, where they live and what language(s) they write in. The content of the blogs is then analyzed to show how it can be used to enhance our understanding of the sociology of translation. Finally, some suggestions for future research in this area are explored.