Language, which represents the most basic means of communication, is the main carrier of a culture as well. One of the best ways to transfer the culture of any language to other societies is through the translation process. Enjoying a history almost as established as human history, the phenomenon of translation is at the heart of socio-cultural, economic, and scientific fields of action that all societies, without exception, attach importance to, especially in today’s global world. More specifically, for Turkey, the first steps of scientific research in this field were taken with the opening of translation departments in universities starting from the first half of the 1980s. However, academic research has gained momentum only after the second half of the 1990s, when academic performance was more valued in universities. Systematic quantitative and qualitative assessment of scholarly research in the field of translation science, as in all fields of science, at certain intervals is significant for determining any development, changes, and trends in this field. The literature review in Turkish shows that postgraduate theses and dissertations on translation have been evaluated bibliometrically and thematically at different times, that some articles and scientific works published in this field, though in limited numbers, have been also systematically examined. However, there is no study in the field of translation studies, as in all other fields, that focuses on proceedings, which are considered as a type of academic publication. This study aims to fill this gap in the field by conducting a cross-sectional bibliometric and thematic analysis on the proceedings produced in the field of translation over the past 32 years in Turkey (1988-2019) and thus to present a helpful resource for future studies on translation. As this study seeks to analyze the data compiled from various aspects, it draws on a "mixed" pattern which allows using both qualitative and quantitative data. To form the corpus of this study, search was performed on the database of the Higher Education Academic Search with the keyword "translation" entered the search engine, which yielded different publication types, and the category of "proceedings" was selected from among them. Then, 11 scientific fields that may be related to the field of translation were selected in the "main fields" section; 99 sub-scientific fields (departments) within these main fields were selected to determine the scope of the corpus through such filtering. In doing so, an initial number of 1448 proceedings were identified, but certain proceedings were not included in the corpus as they were added to the database multiple times by the co-authors, and some were excluded as they were not relevant. Thus, it was assumed that the remaining 895 proceedings were directly related to translation, and the final corpus of the study was formed. Following that, these proceedings were first examined based on different bibliometric data including the year, country, city, type (abstract, full text, poster, oral presentation), scope (national or international) and presentation language. Lastly, this study performed a thematic analysis on the titles of the proceedings and presented the trends of research/studies in this publication type in the field of translation in Turkey over the time period in question. Based on the data obtained from bibliometric analyses, most of the proceedings were presented at congresses and symposiums held across Turkey, and even though some of these organizations were described as "international", they ended up as national. This is also the case for the languages that the proceedings were presented. It is remarkable that although translation has an international nature that directly concerns foreign languages and cultures, almost all of the papers (92 %) are presented in the native language, that is, Turkish. Further, considering the distribution of the proceedings by the reported years, it is remarkable that there has been a significant steady increase in the number of studies, especially in recent years.

This can be considered as a promising development for the field. As for the data obtained from the thematic analysis of the titles of the proceedings, this study concludes that almost half of the proceedings (48 %) included translation reviews of written texts, but reviews for interpreting remained very low as 2.2%, which is a striking finding. Apart from all these, it is reasonable that as translation is a branch of science that is closely intertwined with social sciences in particular, research that examine its links with other disciplines equal to about 1/3 (19 %).