*Translation and international professional communication:* *Building bridges and strengthening skills* CFP at: http://connexionsj.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/translation-and-international... <http://connexionsj.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/translation-and-international-professional-communication.pdf> <http://connexionsj.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/translation-and-international-professional-communication.pdf> Guest editors: *Bruce Maylath **North Dakota State University, USA **Marta Pacheco Pinto **Centre for Comparative Studies, Portugal **Ricardo Muñoz Martín **University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain* The globalization and the fast mobility of today’s markets—aiming to serve as many heterogeneous settings and audiences as possible—have posited a growing need for high quality products and optimal performance in nearly all areas of everyday life. Specialists in communication play an important, albeit often hidden, role in these processes. Translators and other international professional communicators operate as mediators to facilitate understanding across global, international, national and local contexts through diverse communication channels. Translating today often involves several agents with different roles, responsibilities and skills. This entails creative work, various innovative procedures, and collaborative networks in highly technological, distributed environments. All these agents can be seen as text producers with an increasing expertise in the tools and skills of their trades to find, manage, process, and adapt information to target audiences. Despite disperse attempts at acknowledging the importance of approaching professional communication as translation or as involving translation-related skills (e.g., Hoft 1995; Weiss 1995, 1997; Melton 2008), translation often remains invisible both in the literature and in the training of (international) professional communicators. The extant literature in Communication Studies that actually addresses translation usually tends to emphasize, and concentrate on, localization issues, and it often draws from functional approaches to translation as production of a communicative message or instrument (e.g., Vermeer 1996; Nord 1997; Reiss 2000). In Translation Studies, on the other hand, there is an increasing awareness of the need to tend bridges to Communication Studies in research (e.g., Risku 2010; Ehrensberger-Dow & Daniel 2013). However, more dialogue seems necessary to fully grasp the implications and commonalities in all areas of multilingual professional communication, not the least that they are usually ascribed peripheral roles in business, technical, and scientific endeavors. The emerging figure of the multitasked professional communicator has brought translation as part of the document production process to a different level of discussion. It is drawing increasing attention to translators’ profiles and training as competent communicators and vice versa, thus showing that the role translation plays in international professional communication, and the role of international professional communication in translator training cannot be downplayed (Gnecchi et al., 2011). This issue of the *conne**x**ions *journal seeks to build bridges of cross-disciplinary understanding between international professional communication scholars and practitioners and translation scholars and practitioners. It aims to foster debate around the *role of translation as a special kind of international professional communication and also as an integral part of other (international) professional communication instances* . Suggested *topic areas *include, but are not limited to: - University-level training of international professional communicators, its adjustment to market and translation demands, pedagogical challenges to collaborative work. - Curriculum design, (communication and translation) skill development and performance assessment. - Communicative purposes and settings and their impact on translation norms, process and associated abilities. - Ethics and other deontological considerations. - Team work, translation companies and quality-control procedures. - Localization, computer-assisted translation, post-editing and international professional communication. - Localization, multilanguage content delivery, language and communication audit (LCA). - Translating the verbal and the visual in international professional communication (case studies, overall considerations). *Abstracts *to be developed into - Original research articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words of body text. - Review articles of 3,000 to 5,000 words of body text. - Focused commentary and industry perspectives articles of 500 to 3,000 words of body text. - Teaching cases of 3,000 to 5,000 words of body text on the interface between translation and communication are invited (*deadline for submissions *is October 10, 2014). *Submission procedures*: - Prepare the cover page and manuscript with 1.5 line spacing and Georgia, 12-point font. - Save the cover page and manuscript in doc, docx, or rtf format. - Cover page containing your name, institutional affiliation, and email address. - 500-word abstract for original research articles, review articles, and teaching cases; 250-word abstracts for focused commentary and industry perspectives. - Whether you are submitting a research article, a review article, industry perspective article, or teaching case. - Submit via email to Bruce Maylath, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Ricardo Muñoz Martín at trans.profcommunication@gmail.com<trans.profcommunication@gmail.com?subject=> Upon acceptance of your proposal, you will be invited to submit your manuscript. All manuscripts that meet the journal’s standards and requirements will be, without exception, submitted to double-blind peer review. *Schedule* - submission deadline for manuscript abstracts: October 10, 2014 - notification of acceptance: December 14, 2014 - submission deadline for full manuscripts: February 16, 2015 - expected date of publication: June 30, 2015 *Contact information* Bruce Maylath, Marta Pacheco Pinto, and Ricardo Muñoz Martín at trans.profcommunication@gmail.com<trans.profcommunication@gmail.com?subject=> Rosário Durão Editor *www.connexionsjournal.org **connexions •** international professi****onal communication journal *(ISSN 2325-6044) *Department of Communication, Liberal Arts, Social Sciences<http://infohost.nmt.edu/~class/> * *New Mexico Tech <http://www.nmt.edu>** ***