7.2.2 'Laws'of translation

Toury hopes that the cumulative identification of norms in descriptive studies will enable the formulation of probabilistic 'laws' of translation and thence of 'universals of translation'. The tentative laws he proposes are:

1 The law of growing standardization (pp. 267-74), which states that 'in translation, textual relations obtaining in the original are often modified, sometimes to the point of being totally ignored, in favour of [more] habitual options offered by a target repertoire' (p. 268). This refers to the

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disruption of the ST patterns in translation and the selection of lin­guistic options that are more common in the TL. Thus, for example, there will a tendency towards a general standardization and loss of vari­ation in style in the TT, or at least an accommodation to target culture models. This is especially the case if, as commonly occurs, translation assumes a weak and peripheral position in the target system. 2 The law of interference (1995: 274-9), which sees interference from ST to TT as 'a kind of default'. Interference refers to ST linguistic features (mainly lexical and syntactical patterning) being copied in the TT, either 'negatively' (because they create non-normal TT patterns) or 'positively' (the existence of features in the ST that will not be non-normal in the TT makes them more likely to be used by the translator). Toury (p. 278) considers tolerance of interference to depend on sociocultural factors and the prestige of the different literary systems: there is greater toler­ance when translating from a prestigious language or culture, especially if the target language or culture is 'minor'. These laws are further discussed in section 7.2.4 below.

7.2.3 Toury's model in action

Toury (1995) presents a series of case studies, including an 'exemplary' study of conjoint phrases in Hebrew TTs. Conjoint phrases or binomials are pairs of near-synonyms that function together as a single unit. Examples Toury gives from English are able and talented and law and order; and, from German, nie und nimmer. He discusses (pp. 103-4) the significance of such phrases in Hebrew literature, indicating that their use is prevalent in old written Hebrew texts from the Bible onwards and in Hebrew texts from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, when the language was struggling to adapt to modern writing and was under the influence of imported literary models. However, the preference for conjoint phrases has declined over the past fifty years, now that Hebrew is a more confident and central literature. Neverthe­less, Toury (p. 105) suggests that the number of such phrases in Hebrew translations tends to be higher than in Hebrew STs and that translations also contain more newly coined or 'free' combinations (rather than fixed phrases). He supports this with examples from Hebrew translations of chil­dren's literature, of Goethe and of a story by Heinrich Boll {Ansichten eines Clownes). In the latter case, the translator's very frequent use of conjoint phrases to translate single lexical items in German produces a TT that is almost 30 per cent longer than the ST. The effect, in a translation published in 1971, is also to make the Hebrew seem very dated.

From these findings, Toury puts forward a possible generalization to be tested in future studies across languages and cultures. The claim (p. Ill) is that frequent use of conjoint phrases, particularly in place of single lexical items in the ST, 'may represent a universal of translation into systems which are young, or otherwise "weak" '. The consideration of translated literature as

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part of a hierarchical system shows the way DTS interlinks with polysystem theory.

The final stage of Toury's model is the application of the findings. An example is his own translation of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where Toury says he has deliberately used frequent conjoint phrases in Hebrew in order to create 'a parodistic air of "stylistic archaism"' (p. 112).