This special issue builds on past work, while feeding on developments in translation practice and on new interdisciplinary theories and models, to question current methods and to broaden the very role of discourse analysis in translation studies. We hope that they will provide inspiration for other scholars; but, needless to say, there is much room for future research in this area. For example, we are in the early stages of examining the translation of new genres and modes of communication such as social media, tweets, collaborative translation; we also have to explore discourse analytic approaches to the cognitive process of the translator’s understanding of the source text and interpretation in the target text.