Much of my work has been influenced by my interest in the philosophy of science, particularly the work of Karl Popper. I wish I had been more aware of this branch of philosophy much earlier in my own studies!

I am interested in how people argue, what kinds of claims they make and how they justify these claims. I am currently preparing a critical paper on some of the risks of poor conceptual argument in translation research. Examples of such risky arguments are abstract distinctions that seem to have no empirical consequences, or interpretations that seem to have no practical or theoretical implications, nor lead to interesting research questions.

For what purposes might a broad concept of translation, including all kinds of free adaptations, be better than a narrow one? Interpretations (like seeing something “as” something else) can be fruitful, but what happens when interpretations are presented as if they were actually facts?

After my linguistics PhD on “definiteness”, I moved into Translation Studies and have published e.g. on translator training; translation quality, strategies and so-called universals; translation ethics; and translation research methodology. Much of my later work has been in conceptual analysis, for instance on the ways translation scholars have used concepts like “theory”, “hypothesis” and “explanation”.

More recently, I have also been interested in how the idea of the meme can be applied to translation: the meme metaphor helps us to see translation in terms of cultural evolution. Translations spread memes; but as they spread, these memes mutate in interesting ways, and rather more often than genes do.