This May-August 2020 edition found us all going through a very difficult time as a humanity. We hope that you, our readers, co-editors, guest-editors, editorial and scientific committee members, reviewers and potential authors, are all safe and sound, and can get through this turmoil not only unhurt but also renewed.

As life must go on, and our academic pursuits, thankfully, have been transformed but not hindered by the current crisis, it is my pleasure to introduce this new issue of Íkala, which, as the previous one, has a very interesting set of research, and review articles. The issue features a sample of the work by the internationally acclaimed Colombian artist Manuel Guerrero Mora, to whom we want to extend the most sincere thanks for letting us use his work so generously. Thank you, maestro! We believe that his oeuvres are a perfect accompaniment for the articles in this publication, as in many ways these reflect the variety and rigor of his work.

Indeed, the number includes articles in three languages as follows: ten in Spanish, three in English and one in French. Besides, although most of the articles, ten, are empirical studies, this issue also contains two case studies, one literature review, and one book review, all of which were written by authors coming from at least seven countries: Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela. Finally, in spite of the predominance of some topics, such as writing, professional identities, translation, which run through the different sections, the articles present a wide range of topics, methodologies and settings.

The first four empirical studies (Velasco & Meza; Ubilla et al.; García & Rolong; and McDougald & Pissarrello), for example, are interventions taking place in three different countries: Mexico, Chile and Colombia. Although they all had English teachers as participants, the first three (Velasco et al.; Ubilla et al.; and García et al.) were carried out with pre-service English teachers, while the fourth (McDougald & Pissarrello) was conducted with in-service teachers. Also, while the first three focused on writing development, both mediated and not mediated by technology, the fourth explored their knowledge of clil and their perceptions of a clil-based professional development program.

As for the next three empirical studies (by Morales et al.; Otárola et al.; and Casademont), while they all do some form of discourse analysis, they also had very different purposes and were based on very different corpora. Certainly, while the first (Morales et al.) used this research tool to reveal the rhetorical structure of thesis and graduate work conducted by dentistry students in Spanish, the second one (Otárola et al.) used it to uncover the lexical verb forms being used in narratives produced by users of Chilean sign language, and the third one (Casademont) turned to it to detect the most recurrent errors made by French-speaking learners of Catalan.

As to the last three empirical studies (Cruz-Arcila; Singer et al.; and Vine-Jara), while the first two (Cruz-Arcila; and Singer et al.) delved into participants’ narratives for how they configured their professional identities, the third (Vine-Jara) compared Chilean translation and engineering students’ perceptions on academic writing as expressed in a questionnaire. Also, while two of them (Singer et al. and Vine-Jara) focused on translator trainees in Chile, the other one (Cruz-Arcila) zoomed in Colombian rural English teachers.

As the empirical studies, the two case studies included in this issue (Fuentes & López; and Weber) are quite varied in their topics, methods, and aims. Clearly, while the first (Fuentes & López) examines the dubbing and subtitling of three animation films produced in Spain to identify the cultural elements in the original version and to decipher how they have been translated to the English version, the second one (Weber) explores the morphosyntactical and lexical differences between Pablo Montoya and José Angel Valente’s translations of the book The Stranger by Camus.

In spite of all these differences, the studies in both of these sections all have something in common that we want to highlight, and that is the implications for teaching. At a time when scholars from all over the world are looking for new ways of responding to these unusual learning circumstances, it is important that the research in which we engage -regardless of whether it is qualitative or quantitative, includes an intervention or not, and uses discourse analysis or other forms of data processing- ends with that.

The last two articles featured (Chois et al., and Giraldo) perfectly complete this interesting assemble of articles, as one reviews the pedagogical experiences used by Latin American scholars to teach writing in graduate school while the other one reviews a book by Alan James Runcieman about a topic that runs through the other sections of the issue, that of the construction of our professional identity as interpreters.

We hope that you enjoy them all and find them a profitable read.