The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the various usages of the term ‘translation’, ranging from its intuitive, pre-scientific usages to more scientific ones, both inside Translation Studies and outside its disciplinary field, in order to grasp the epistemic status assigned to it and at the same time to examine its inflationary proliferation across other disciplines.
In this endeavour, our attention will be first drawn towards the polysemy of the term ‘translation’. In a second step, an attempt will be made to map the different contexts and reasons that enabled new expansions of the term to other fields (semiotics, cognition and cultural studies), leading it to assume an upgraded interdisciplinary status. No doubt the cross disciplinary trends prevailing in the last 60 years are responsible for such a widespread dissemination (and eventual decharacterization ?) of the term.
Finally some of the changeable dimensions associated with translation as well as the search for some common denominators will be tackled.
