Description, Explanation, Prediction: A Response to Gideon Toury and Theo Hermans

Abstract

Norms When norms entered Translation Studies, they offered solutions to two kinds of theoretical problems. First, they offered a way of escape from the tradition of prescriptive studies: much of the older thinking was prescriptive in tone and intent, with translators proposing general principles about what translations should be like, or appealing to such principles in justifying why they had translated the way they had. The concept of norms allows modern translation scholars to take a distance from this prescriptiveness: we can describe the norms which appear to exist in a given culture at a given time, but it is the norms that do the prescribing, not the scholars. That is, the norms are experienced by those who translate as being prescriptive, regulatory. To break these norms is to run the risk of criticism; but it may also, of course, lead to the establishment of new norms. As Toury stresses, norms are thus of central importance in the training of translators, in their socialisation into the profession. Second, norms offered a way of explaining why translations have the form they do. Given certain features of a translation, or of translations in a particular culture at a particular period, we can propose norms as causes of these translation features, or of these translator’ s decisions: the translator did this, because he or she wished to conform to a given norm. In translation research, norms are thus not really ends in themselves, but means; they are explanatory hypotheses that may help us to understand more about the phenomenon of translation. One major result of the introduction of translation norms has been the expansion of the object of study. We now have a wider concept of what translation is, and of what it can be, than earlier. The move from an essentialist position (a translation must have feature X) to a relativist one (let us see what kinds of texts are called translations in this culture) has been enormously beneficial here, in freeing research from unnecessary constraints. However, the essentialist position cannot be rejected entirely: there must be some constraints on what we take as translations, otherwise we might as well study any text at all, or even the universe in general. Toury himself (1995: 33‐ 35) has proposed three postulates (that there is a source text, that there has been a transfer process, and that there is an accountable relationship between source and target) which look like conditions for a text to be called a translation, although he says that these postulates are not factual but indeed ‘ posited’ , to be tested against the data. If all