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The initiator, which is the company or individual who needs the translation. |
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The commissioner, who is the individual who contacts the translator |
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The ST producer, who is the individual within the company who writes the ST, not necessarily always involved in the TT production. |
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The TT producer who is the translator. |
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The TT user, who is the person who uses the TT. |
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The TT receiver, who is the final recipient of the TT |
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Translatorial action produces a TT that is functionally communicative and functionally suitable in the target culture. It places translation in its socio-cultural context, which includes the interplay between the translator and the institution which initiated it and stresses functionality.
The skopos theory gets its name from the Greek word 'skopos' which means 'purpose'. This approach to translation stresses the purpose of the translation, which determines the translation strategies to be adopted. A translatum i.e. the translated text (the TT) is determined by its skopos. Knowing why a text is to be translated and what its function is going to be in the target culture is important in this approach.
Systems approaches to translation are the polysystem theory of Even-Zohar, Toury's Descriptive Translation Studies approach and what is called the Manipulation School.
The polysystem approach to translation, feeding on the Russian Formalist school , sees translated literature as a system operating as a part of larger social, cultural and historical systems of the target culture. It reacts against the concept of 'high' literature, which regards as unimportant types like thrillers, children's literature and translated literature. Even-Zohar, the Israeli architect of the polysystem approach, stresses that translated literature operates as a system, which is part of other systems, other co-systems. Polysystem is the name given to the overarching concept of these systems. Translated literature may occupy different positions in the polysystem at different times. Even-Zohar says there are three cases where literature occupies a primary position.(as summarized in Munday 2001):
When a 'young' written literature is being established and looks initially to 'older' literatures for ready-made models. Translations from other tongues in such cases assume prestige. When a literature is 'peripheral' or 'weak' and imports those literary types that it lacks. This is typically the case when a smaller nation is dominated by the culture of a larger one. The indigenous languages import into their folds translated literature of the culturally dominant group. Where there is a critical turning point in literary history at which established models are no longer considered sufficient, or when there is a vacuum in the literature of the country where no type holds sway it is easier for foreign models to assume primacy.
The Even-Zoharian polysystem approach states that the position occupied by translated literature in the polysystem conditions the translation strategy adopted. If it is primary, translators do not feel constrained to follow models in the target culture, thus feeling free to break conventions. If on the other hand translated literature occupies a secondary position, translators tend to use existing target culture models. In the latter case, more nonadequate translations may result. Despite criticisms, the polysystem approach has had considerable influence on future translation studies, placing translation as it did in different contexts and being less prescriptive.
It was Gideon Toury (1995) who first argued for a systematic branch of the discipline of Translation Studies to replace isolated studies that were the order of the day. Toury proposed the following three phase methodology for systematic DTS (=Descriptive Translation Studies) (as summarized in Munday 2001):
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Situate the text within the target culture system, looking at its significance or acceptability. |
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Compare the ST and the TT for shifts, identifying relationships between 'coupled airs' of ST and TT segments, and attempting generalizations about the underlying concept of translation. |
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Draw implications for decision-making in future translating. |
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Toury suggests, based on paired language translations, we widen our corpus and build a descriptive profile of translations and having done that, identify norms of each kind of translation. This would lead us to a statement of laws of translation behavior.
Norms in translation behavior
These norms are socio-cultural constraints, which are society-, culture-, and time-specific. One could reconstruct the norms that are operative in a particular translation, make statements about the decision-making processes that the translator has gone through and formulate hypotheses that can be tested by future studies. Toury places norms between rules and idiosyncrasies. There are three kinds of norms:
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Initial norm, which refers to the general choice, made by the translator, whether in particular the translator subjects himself to the norms in the ST or to those of target culture. The former is realized as adequacy and the latter as acceptability, adequacy and acceptability being situated at the poles of a continuum. |
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Preliminary norm refers to the translation policy, which determines the text to be translated, and directness of translation that refers to whether the translation occurs through an intermediary language as in the case of Indian languages, the intermediary is often English. |
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Operational norms have to do with the presentation and linguistic matter of the TT. These sub-categorize into matrical norms and textual-linguistic norms. Matrical norms relate to textual segmentation, addition of passages and footnotes, deletion or relocation of passages. Textual-linguistic norms control the selection of TT linguistic material such as words and phrases. |
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Toury introduces the term 'translational equivalence' when he talks about the examination of the ST and the TT. Toury's is however a different notion from the traditional notion of equivalence. His is a 'functional-relational' concept, which means that equivalence is assumed between two languages, and is not a perspective notion of equivalence between two cross-linguistic expressions. This assumed equivalence between two languages has one focus on how this assumed equivalence is realized and is a tool for uncovering 'the concept of translation ...(the) derived notions of decision-making and the factors that constrain it.'
Laws of Translation
Toury's idea of norms in descriptive studies will enable, he thought, a formulation of laws of translation and thereby lead us onto 'universals of translation'. The laws he proposes are:
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The law of growing standardization, which states that textual relations of the original are ignored in favour of the options offered by the target language. |
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The law of interference. Interference here refers to the ST linguistic features being copied in the TT. This happens understandably when the translation is from a prestigious language or culture and the target language or culture is minor. |
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Chesterman's Norms
Gideon Toury's norms were supposed to be non-prescriptive. While saying that all norms exert a prescriptive pressure, Andrew Chesterman proposed his own set of norms, which covered the areas of Toury's initial and operational norms. Chesterman's norms are:
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Product or expectancy norms. These 'are established', says Chesterman, 'by the expectations of readers of a translation (of a given type) concerning what a translation (of this type) should be like'. These norms are governed by the predominant translation tradition in the target culture, discourse conventions of the same TL genre and economic and ideological considerations. |
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Professional norms. These regulate the translation process. They are subordinate to and are determined by expectancy norms. |
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Chesterman proposed three kinds of professional norm
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