TPCCCTranslation Practice and Cross‑Cultural Communication3083-33883083-337XBio-Byword Scientific Publishing Pty. Ltd.10.26689/TPCCC.v1i2.15843ArticleFrom Translation Risk to Mediation Decisions: A Cross-Case Study of Translator Mediation in Authentic Translation Projectshttps://artdesignp.com/journal/TPCCC/1/2/10.26689/TPCCC.v1i2.15843ChenRong,LiJing2026122026-04-26Translator mediation is often discussed as the management of cultural distance, yet professional translators also mediate domain knowledge, genre expectations, technologies, stakeholders, and production constraints. This article examines how such mediation operates in four authentic translation projects: a Chinese-to-English railway video-course localization project, an English-to-Chinese trade-book translation, a Chinese-to-English popular-science book on Chinese folk culture and physics, and a Chinese-to-English journal-article translation. A retrospective multiple-case design combined qualitative content analysis with cross-case synthesis. The dataset comprised project briefs, case reports, work logs, translation notes, bilingual drafts, terminology files, courseware, and deliverable inventories. The unit of analysis was the translation decision episode: a documented problem or risk linked to an action, resource, revision, or outcome. Within-case analysis identified seven recurrent risk domains: knowledge, terminology and consistency, cultural-conceptual, genre and discourse, process, technological and multimodal, and stakeholder-ethical risk. Cross-case comparison showed that translators responded through four interdependent forms of mediation: evidential, discursive, stakeholder, and technological-process mediation. These were organized into a recurrent Risk-Evidence-Decision-Revision cycle rather than a sequence of isolated textual techniques. Translation memories and terminology bases stabilized repeated choices, but they did not replace judgment; meetings, source checking, parallel texts, client queries, and differentiated revision redistributed uncertainty across people and artifacts. The study reframes translator mediation as situated risk governance and proposes a process model that connects risk identification, evidence assembly, decision authorization, implementation, and revision. The findings support project-based translator education that assesses not only target-text quality but also the traceability and revisability of decisions.Translator mediation,Translation risk,Authentic projects,Multiple-case study,Translation technology,Translator education

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