Literature regarding translation studies has increased rapidly in recent decades, yet there have been few empirical studies to investigate the research context of translation studies at the global level. A bibliometric analysis was carried out in this research to probe the current status and the research themes of translation studies papers published between 2000 and 2015 in all journals indexed by the Web of Science database. Bibliometric methods and knowledge visualization technologies were employed to thoroughly investigate publication activities, geographic distributions, core literature, and the distinctive research areas of translation research. The study distinguishes three research areas in translation studies, namely, theoretical translation studies, translation and interpreting training, and descriptive translation studies. The dissemination of knowledge in these areas is realized by publication sources specializing in language and linguistics, applied linguistics and pragmatics, phonetics and acoustics, and translation and interpreting. The core literature in translation studies has been focused to focus on linguistic theories, research methodology, theoretical models, interpreting, and new perspectives. This study provides researchers with several useful insights to better understand developments in translation studies.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

English tense is widely believed as one of the most problematic areas in the

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Dahui Dong & Mu-Li Yang. The application of ergative verbs to avoid accusations in the translation of Chinese editorials into English. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, PL ISSN 0079-4740, pp. 17-32The use of ergative verbs results in the agent being backgrounded in an English sentence, and it is often used in the media together with other means such as the use of intransitive verbs, passives, and nominalized nouns to achieve the pragmatic purpose of accusation avoidance. A great deal of research has been done on the role of ergative verbs in media discourse in English as well as the acquisition of ergative verbs by learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, it remains unclear how EFL Chinese learners of advanced levels of competence, such as postgraduates of translation majors and professional translators, use ergative verbs when translating newspaper editorials from Chinese into English. Nor is it clear whether learners have acquired the requisite knowledge of ergative verbs in order to use them effectively so as to avoid blaming the agent of an action or process in translation. This study recruited 30 native Chinese-speaking translators who fell into three categories: undergraduate translators, graduate translators, and professional translators. A small parallel translation corpus was built, which consisted of 150 English translations of 5 Chinese editorials produced by the translators. Accusation-avoidance expressions in the source text and their translations were then extracted and input into an SPSS spreadsheet. The results show that the use of ergative verbs in translations by undergraduate translators is significantly higher than in translations by graduate and professional translators in terms of quantity. The results of the study may be useful for translation teaching and learning.