Translation has received very little attention in economics. Existing contributions can first be arranged in two main categories as follows:

DESCRIPTIONS, backed up by more or less extensive quantitative data, of translation as an economic sector; the quantitative information, which is usually arranged by target language or by country, variously contains estimates of:

— the number of persons involved in the profession;

— the annual turnover of more or less narrowly defined translation services;

— the volume of output (words, pages, etc.).

Such descriptions are usually not produced by (academic) economists and are generally due to professional associations.

ANALYTICAL WORK providing theory-based explanations of some aspect or other of translation perceived as a “product” in the economic sense of the term. This work is more likely to be due to academic economists, although some contributions have come from scholars in sociology or in the language disciplines, who have adopted an economic perspective in their research on translation.

The expression “analytical work” should also be understood in a broad sense, encompassing both strictly theoretical work (usually in the form of algebraic modelling, with a focus on investigating the nature of the relationships between variables) and empirical work, in which statistical data are used to test the propositions generated by theoretical models.