Introduction

Translation and interpreting studies scholars have long looked to pragmatics to help explain and account for meaning-generation in translation and interpreting processes, products and their reception. In fact, the range of issues discussed in Hickey’s (1998) edited volume, The Pragmatics of Translation, still resonate today as researchers and practitioners grapple with “what original texts and their translations are intended to achieve and how they attempt to achieve it, how writers set about cooperating with their readers, being polite and relevant, or how inter-cultural difference may be achieved” (p. 5). Since Hickey’s volume was published, ¹ translation studies scholars have engaged with a much broader range of topics and practices, particularly in relation to spoken and signed language interpreting, and, more recently, in relation to different (translation) technologies. This Handbook therefore provides a timely opportunity to appraise developments, to bring together some of the latest thinking on the relationship between pragmatics and translation and interpreting studies, to showcase applications of key concepts in a broad range of translation activities and to set out new avenues for research.