Towards the history of indirect translation research: main trends, pending questions and possible lines of future inquiry

This article concerns indirect translation (ITr), understood braodly as translation of translation (Gambier 1994). ITr is an age-old phenomenon (e.g. the Bible, I Ching, Shakespeare translation or activity of the so-called Toledo School), with widespread use in various areas of today's society (e.g. audiovisual, institutional, literary and news translation; localization; conference and community interpreting) and positive prospects for the foreseeable future (e.g., due to the globalization and the growing need to edit texts via lingua francae, e.g. in international organizations). Despite the traditional neglect in Translation Studies, the phenomenon has been attracting increasingly scholarly attention (especially for the past twenty years, c.f. Pięta 2017) and begins to establish itself as a subarea of research within Translation Studies. Time has possibly come to "take the temperature" of ITr research and survey the emergence and development of this subfield of enquiry (thereby contributing to the writing of the history of ITr research). With this in mind, the article will provide an overview of some of the main patterns, unanswered queries in ITr research and explores suggestions for future studies in the field. The overview will follow the 'Five W's and One H' approach. The what question explores the relevance of systemativ studies on ITr. The who question considers the profile of ITr researchers. The where question relates to the geographic spread of ITr research. The when question regards the diachronic evolution of ITr studies. The why question looks into the reasons behind the traditional neglect of ITr in Translation Studies discipline. Finally, the how questions considers selected details of ITr processes as well as methods used in identifying most probable mediating texts and languages. The article will end by considering prospects for (research on) ITr training.