Taking up the challenge of a non-prescriptive approach to translation: Gideon Toury and descriptive translation studies

Abstract

There is a tendency to see a direct link between the polysystem theory and descriptive translation studies (DTS),1 which I would like to refer to here briefly. The main, and perhaps sole, connection lies in the fact that the concept of DTS developed on the background of understanding translation as a part of textual activities or textual industries, and so justified looking at the way that translations function as textual products in a culture that uses translation. At best the link is ‘translation as a legitimate activity in culture’. The context could have been the polysystem theory, as well as any other conceptual framework formed on the basis provided by Russian Formalism. It was, of course, no coincidence that Even-Zohar developed this conceptualization at Tel-Aviv University and that Toury selected certain items from it when he formulated his DTS theory, since Toury wrote his PhD dissertation under Even-Zohar’s supervision and so was exposed to his thinking in more than one way. However, Tynjanov and Ejxenbaum were the first to have initiated the discourse ontexts (or rather models for writing) moving from culture to culture, not as ‘influence’ but rather as the inner function suited to a target culture. Indeed, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it was from Tynjanov and Jakobson that Even-Zohar borrowed the notion of ‘a system of systems’. Literary traditions formed systems, so did genres and so did the single literary work itself, all interrelated and interacting within the entire social order, and conditioning how specific formal elements would function. Without this concept of sameness, or familiarity, or ‘systemicity’ it would be impossible to determine that which was new, different, deviating, defamiliarizing. The only way descriptive translation studies is ‘descriptive’ is in contrast with the primitivecontext of the period, where a great deal of translation theories were ‘prescriptive’. However, the approach is not descriptive but analytical, based on relational thinking that compels one to consider not the products but the relations between them. In this waytranslation is seen as part of the general heterogeneity of culture/society, and the question is how it functions in a given context. Hence the basic concept that translation activity has to be seen as first and foremost within the target culture. This principle applies not only to translation of texts, but to all procedures and processes involved in cultural transfer, and as such there is no principle difference between transfer of food, furniture, or texts. Only in this way can the polysystem theory be connected to translation studies, for it is a theory of cultural heterogeneity (even if it was first a theory on literature). Thinking in terms of heterogeneity necessitates multilinear and not linear thinking.