Translation ecologies: A Beginner's guide

This article applies basic concepts of ecology to the cultural environments of literary translation, arguing that the duality of source-target twin texts should be considered within contexts corresponding to the different cultural systems of increasing complexity that are nested within one another: populations, communities, ecosystems, and biomes. The ecological-systemic approach to translation combines polysystem theory with social network analysis and the possibility that a digital humanities accounting of metadata signaling the overall environment for translation in the US may provide insight. The article ends with a discussion of the authors' current project to make a Big Data approach to translation operative.