7.2 Toury and descriptive translation studies

Working with Even-Zohar in Tel Aviv was Gideon Toury. After his early polysystem work on the sociocultural conditions which determine the trans­lation of foreign literature into Hebrew, Toury focused on developing a gen­eral theory of translation. In chapter 1, we considered Toury's diagrammatic representation of Holmes's 'map' of translation studies. In his influential Descriptive Translation Studies - And Beyond (Toury 1995: 10), Toury calls for the development of a properly systematic descriptive branch of the discipline to replace isolated free-standing studies that are commonplace:

What is missing is not isolated attempts reflecting excellent intuitions and supply­ing fine insights (which many existing studies certainly do), but a systematic branch proceeding from clear assumptions and armed with a methodology and research

112 Systems theories

DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION STUDIES 113

techniques made as explicit as possible and justified within translation studies itself. Only a branch of this kind can ensure that the findings of individual studies will be intersubjectively testable and comparable, and the studies themselves

replicable.

(Toury 1995: 3)

Toury goes on to propose just such a methodology for the branch of descrip­tive translation studies (DTS).

For Toury (1995: 13), translations first and foremost occupy a position in the social and literary systems of the target culture, and this position deter­mines the translation strategies that are employed. With this approach, he is continuing and building on the polysystem work of Even-Zohar and on earlier versions of his own work (Toury 1978, 1980, 1985, 1991). Toury (1995: 36-9 and 102) proposes the following three-phase methodology for systematic DTS, incorporating a description of the product and the wider role of the sociocultural system:

1. Situate the text within the target culture system, looking at its signifi­cance or acceptability.

2. Compare the ST and the TT for shifts, identifying relationships between 'coupled pairs' of ST and TT segments, and attempting generalizations about the underlying concept of translation.

3. Draw implications for decision-making in future translating.

An important additional step is the possibility of repeating phases (1) and (2) for other pairs of similar texts in order to widen the corpus and to build up a descriptive profile of translations according to genre, period, author, etc. In this way, the norms pertaining to each kind of translation can be identified with the ultimate aim (as more descriptive studies are performed) of stating laws of behaviour for translation in general. The concepts of norms and laws are further discussed in sections 7.2.1 and 7.2.2 below.

The second step of Toury's methodology is one of the most controversial areas. The decisions on which ST and TT segments to examine and what the relationships are between them is an apparatus which Toury (1995: 85) states should be supplied by translation theory. Yet, as we have seen in chapters 4 and 5, linguistic translation theory is far from reaching a consensus as to what that apparatus should be. Most controversially, in earlier papers (1978: 93, 1985: 32), Toury still holds to the use of a hypothetical intermediate invariant or tertzum comparationis (see page 49 for a discussion of this term) as an 'Adequate Translation' (AT) against which to gauge translation shifts. However, at the same time he also admits (1978: 88-9) that, in practice, no translation is ever fully 'adequate'; for this contradiction, and for consider­ing the hypothetical invariant to be a universal given, he has been roundly criticized (see, e.g., Gentzler 1993: 131-2, Hermans 1999: 56-7).

In his 1995 book, Toury drops the invariant concept. What remains in his model is a 'mapping' of the TT onto the ST which 'yields a series of (ad hoc) coupled pairs' (Toury 1995: 77). This is a type of comparison which Toury

admits (p. 80) is inevitably 'partial [and] indirect' and which will undergo a

'continuous revision' during the very analytical process itself. The result is a 3"

flexible and non-prescriptive, if also less than rigorously systematic, means £

of comparing ST and TT. The flexibility leads to different aspects of texts ^

being examined in Toury's series of case studies. Thus, in one study (pp. 148- ^

65) it is the addition of rhymes and omission of passages in the Hebrew S| translation of a German fairy tale; in another study it is conjoint phrases in literature translated into Hebrew (see section 7.2.3 below).