Translation in Systems

Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained

Theo Hermans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000012064
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A critically acclaimed foundational text, Translation in Systems offers a comprehensive guide to the descriptive and systemic approaches which have shaped translation studies. Theo Hermans considers translation norms, equivalence, polysystems and social systems, covering a wide range of theorists in his discussion of the principles of translation studies. Reissued with a new foreword by Kathryn Batchelor, which updates the text for a new generation of readers, Translation in Systems endures partly on account of Hermans's vivid and articulate writing style.

The book covers the fundamental problems of translation norms, equivalence, polysystems and social systems, encompassing not only the work of Levý, Holmes, Even-Zohar, Toury, Lefevere, Lambert, Bassnett, D'hulst and others, but also giving special attention to contributions derived from Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann. Hermans explains how contemporary descriptive approaches came about, what the basic ideas were, how those ideas have evolved over time, and offers a critique of these approaches.

With practical questions of how to investigate translation (including problems of definition, description and assessment of readerships), this is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in translation studies and related areas.

1 An invisible college

Names

The approach to translation and to studying translation set out in the following chapters goes under different names. This is not unusual. Many names of movements or currents of thought in the arts, the humanities or the sciences are not the invention of the people most directly concerned but given by outsiders. The Russian Formalist literary critics of the beginning of the twentieth century spoke of themselves as ‘morphologists’ and ‘specifiers’, but their opponents branded them as ‘formalists’. The Cubist painters took their name from a remark made by a hostile reviewer that their canvases looked as if covered with little cubes. When the protagonists of a particular approach themselves make efforts to devise a name and propagate it, there is usually an agenda behind it. They want to stand out, to be recognized as different from some existing approach. The Expressionists wrote and painted in direct opposition to the older Impressionists. Postmodernism and Poststructuralism see themselves emphatically as coming after, and calling into question the assumptions of, Modernism and Structuralism. These names have an oppositional edge to them which allows us to glimpse a programme of action.

The labels attached to the approach which forms the subject of this book are partly donned and partly given by others. We need to sort them out first, without necessarily settling on a single designation.

The term most commonly used is ‘descriptive’, as in ‘the descriptive approach’ or ‘descriptive translation studies’. It dates from the early 1970s and derives its polemical force from the deliberate opposition to ‘prescriptive’ translation studies. Seen in this light the term ‘descriptive translation studies’ signals the rejection of the idea that the study of translation should be geared primarily to formulating rules, norms or guidelines for the practice or evaluation of translation or to developing didactic instruments for translator training. On the positive side ‘descriptive’ points to an interest in translation as it actually occurs, now and in the past, as part of cultural history. It seeks insight into the phenomenon and the impact of translation without immediately wanting to plough that insight back into some practical application to benefit translators, critics or teachers. Because it focuses on the observable aspects of translation, it has also been called ‘empirical’. And because it holds that the investigation of translation may as well start with the thing itself and its immediate environment, i.e. with translations and their contexts rather than with source texts, the term ‘target-oriented’ translation studies also applies, distinguishing this perspective from ‘source-oriented’ approaches.

But ‘descriptive’, ‘empirical’ and even ‘target-oriented translation studies’ are rather unspecific terms. Plenty of work on, say, medieval or eighteenth-century translation, or on linguistic aspects of translation, is descriptive in the sense of being non-prescriptive, empirical in its concern with existing translations, and target-oriented in that it engages with translations rather than the originals which gave rise to them. In the present book the terms refer in the first instance to the approach adopted by the group of researchers who will be introduced in the second part of this chapter; by extension it applies to other work carried out along these lines.

It is a matter of historical accident that the American James Holmes, a pioneer of descriptive translation studies, also proposed in 1972 the name ‘translation studies’ as the designation, in English, of the scholarly preoccupation, whether theoretical, empirical or applied, with any and all aspects of translation. The term is now commonly used and refers to the entire field of study. Confusingly, however, ‘translation studies’ has on occasion been taken to mean the specifically descriptive line of approach (for example, in Koller 1990). Fortunately this usage is now rare. In the following pages ‘translation studies’ means the whole discipline.

The approach known as ‘descriptive translation studies’ is sometimes referred to as the ‘polysystem approach’, after one of its prominent concepts. The term ‘polysystem’ was invented by the Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar and has also found application outside the world of translation, especially in literary studies. We can also speak, more broadly, of a ‘systemic’ perspective on translation, which would then include other system-theoretic concepts apart from the polysystem concept. It is good to bear in mind, though, that one can perfectly well operate along descriptive lines without taking on board any systems or polysystems ideas.

Occasionally the term ‘Low Countries group’ is heard in connection with the approach described here. This is because several of its proponents work in or hail from Flanders and the Netherlands. The term is inappropriate because obviously too narrow. It ignores not only the seminal role played by Gideon Toury and Itamar Even-Zohar together with a number of other Israeli scholars, but also the contributions made by researchers elsewhere in Europe and the United States as well as in Turkey, Korea, Brazil, Hong Kong and other places. Designations like ‘Tel Aviv school’ or ‘Tel Aviv-Leuven school’ are equally inappropriate, for similar reasons. Descriptive translation studies cannot be reduced to two or three individuals or centres. It is not a unified approach.

Finally, there is the term ‘Manipulation group’ or ‘Manipulation school’. It derives from the collection of essays called The Manipulation of Literature (Hermans 1985a). The word ‘manipulation’ in the book’s title was suggested by André Lefevere. The term ‘Manipulation group’, coined by Armin Paul Frank (1987:xiii), gained currency through Mary Snell-Hornby’s account of this approach (1988:22–26) as one of the two main schools of thought in translation studies in Europe in the 1980s. The designation picks up one of the more provocative claims in the introduction to The Manipulation of Literature, to the effect that, from the target perspective, “all translation implies a degree of manipulation of the source text for a certain purpose” (Hermans 1985a:11).

All the above terms are in use and appear to have entered the first reference works on translation studies (the Dictionary of Translation Studies, Shuttleworth & Cowie 1997, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Baker 1998, and the Handbuch Translation, Snell-Hornby, Hönig et al. 1998). In the following pages I shall employ the designations ‘descriptive’, ‘empirical’ and ‘target-oriented’ approach, ‘polysystems’ and ‘systemic’ approach and ‘Manipulation school/group’ more or less interchangeably, depending on the context. This does not mean that everyone discussed in this book would want to label their own work indiscriminately with any or all of these names; but I trust most can live with most of them.

Invisible colleges

The descriptive and systemic perspective on translation and on studying translation was prepared in the 1960s, developed in the 1970s, propagated in the 1980s, and consolidated, expanded and overhauled in the 1990s. It introduced itself to the wider world in 1985 as “a new paradigm” in translation studies (Hermans 1985a:7).

Now, ‘paradigm’ is a big word. Its deployment at the time was obviously a rhetorical move, designed to highlight the oppositional, novel and radical aspects of the new stance. It sounds somewhat self-conscious, and contains an element of defiance. It might also signal an attempt by its proponents to prove their intellectual credentials by showing an awareness of theoretical issues. The term itself derives from the philosophy of science.

The idea of paradigms was made popular by Thomas Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. Although Kuhn did not provide a definition of his key term, for our purposes a paradigm can be understood as “a model of scientific achievement that sets guidelines for research”, and as “a means for conducting research on a particular problem, a problem-solving device” (Crane 1972:7, 29). In his book Kuhn rejected the common conception that knowledge in the sciences grows cumulatively, and instead proposed a different and more discontinuous pattern. The normal state occurs in periods of what he called ‘normal science’, during which the implications of a particular paradigm are explored. In time an increasing number of paradoxes, incompatibilities, contradictions and unresolved questions may lead to a crisis and to a ‘paradigm shift’, a revolution, when a radically new way of looking is proposed, hotly debated, and finally accepted by at least part of the scientific community as a promising way forward. From that moment onwards research is conducted on a new footing as the new paradigm is explored, which means another period of ‘normal science’ has begun.

Kuhn’s book is concerned with momentous changes in the history of science. He discusses Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Poincaré, Einstein and other giants. To call on his notion of paradigms in the context of translation studies, a discipline of huge ambition but as yet modest dimension and achievement, looks a bit overblown. On the other hand, Kuhn’s book proved so successful that the term has been subject to inflationary use in all sorts of disciplines. In any case, in the postscript which he added to the second edition in 1969, Kuhn pointed out that a revolution “need not be a large change, nor need it seem revolutionary to those outside a single community” (Kuhn 1970:181). In the same postscript he stressed that a paradigm “governs, in the first instance, not a subject matter but rather a group of practitioners. Any study of paradigm-directed or of paradigm-shattering research must begin by locating the responsible group or groups” (1970:180). If he were to rewrite his book, he added, he would probably put more emphasis on these groups of practitioners than on the abstract notion of a paradigm.

This idea provides me with a convenient point of entry. The paradigm, or, as Kuhn’s postscript also calls it, the ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970:182) to be explained in the following chapters, has undoubtedly proved successful, inspirational, controversial, liberating and problematic, all at the same time. Before we launch into its central ideas, its applications and implications, it will be useful to take Kuhn’s advice and look at the group of practitioners behind it. We have a perfectly appropriate frame for this in Diana Crane’s notion of the ‘invisible college’, a network of researchers working within a given paradigm (Crane 1972).

With her ‘invisible college’ Crane offers a model of the growth and diffusion of knowledge in scientific and scholarly communities. The model, which builds on Kuhn’s work, is applicable to both the sciences and the humanities. The emphasis however is very much on the social organization of research areas and on the role of communities and networks of researchers. The central claim is that scientific and scholarly practice is not a matter of disembodied ideas spontaneously combusting and gaining acceptance from eerily rational minds. There is a social as well as a cognitive aspect to the process. It involves practitioners working in an institutional environment, regular personal contacts and a sense of solidarity, and a material as well as an intellectual infrastructure.

Diana Crane discerns a pattern in the way new ideas and paradigms emerge and spread. She describes this as a contagion process. Seminal ideas are first tried out in a small circle, early enthusiasts then infect others, which leads to an exponential growth in the production of research until a plateau is reached with voluminous output but few new ideas, after which stagnation sets in, followed by decline – and, of course, new sets of different ideas. In other words, when a paradigm runs its natural course, it goes through a series of stages (Crane 1972:40, 67ff):

• • first, interesting hypotheses, theories, discoveries and methodological principles attract a group of like-minded researchers who reach consensus on key issues;
• • soon a small number of highly productive individuals develop a theoretical apparatus, set priorities for research, recruit collaborators and train students, and maintain contact with colleagues;
• • next, we witness an exponential increase in publications and in new recruits, allowing the central ideas to be elaborated and tested;
• • eventually the novelty wears off, the rate of innovation declines, the exploration of the key ideas loses impetus, theoretical and methodological anomalies open up, some members drop out;
• • finally the leading researchers develop increasingly specialized interests, or divide into factions over controversial issues; this may result in adjustments and new directions for research, or in breakdown and the eventual emergence of a different paradigm.

In the crucial early stages the guiding ideas are formulated, and they continue to provide the main focus. Their authors are also the ones most frequently cited by fellow researchers. The model stresses the element of solidarity. An invisible college constitutes a personal and intellectual network, with regular informal contacts, joint ventures and publications, frequent cross-referencing in articles and books, and, for the central players, a long-term commitment to the field and to the basic ideas.

Manipulation college?

The growth and diffusion of the descriptive/systemic/manipulation paradigm in translation studies can be described with almost uncanny ease in terms of Diana Crane’s invisible college.

Among the first exchanges that would lead to the crystallization of a coherent ‘disciplinary matrix’ was the meeting of minds, in the 1960s, between the Amsterdam-based American translator and theorist James Holmes and a Czechoslovak group including Jiří Levý, Anton Popovič and František Miko. They were interested in such things as structuralist literary theory, the role of translation as part of literary history, ways of describing differences between translations and originals from stylistic or generic points of view, and the distinctive features of translation in relation to other ‘metatexts’, i.e. texts which speak about existing texts. Levý died in 1969, aged 41, Popovič in 1984, and the Czechoslovak group eventually fell silent. By that time however contacts had been established with, on the one hand, Itamar Even-Zohar and his colleague Gideon Toury, two researchers at Tel Aviv University, both with strong theoretical interests, and, on the other, several Flemish academics including José Lambert at Leuven University, Raymond van den Broeck, who worked at a translator training institute in Antwerp, and André Lefevere, who had studied at Essex University, taught briefly in Hong Kong and then at Antwerp, and would later settle in Austin, Texas.

The decisive stage of theory formation occurred during a series of three relatively small-scale conferences, all held in English. The first took place in Leuven in 1976, the second in Tel Aviv in 1978, and the third in Antwerp in 1980. The proceedings of the first conference were published as Literature and Translation (Holmes, Lambert & Van den Broeck 1978), those of the second in a special issue of the journal Poetics Today (vol. 2, no. 4, 1981, edited by Even-Zohar and Toury), and those of the third in the Michigan-based semiotics journal Dispositio (vol. 7, nos. 19–21, 1982, edited by Lefevere). The names of the conference organizers and proceedings editors are those of the key figures in the descriptive and systemic paradigm. Others who attended and/or spoke at one or more of the conferences and continued to be associated with the group include Susan Bassnett (Warwick University), Katrin van Bragt (Leuven), Lieven D’hulst (Leuven and then Antwerp), Zohar Shavit (Tel Aviv), Maria Tymoczko (Massachusetts), Shelly Yahalom (Tel Aviv) and Theo Hermans (Warwick and then London). Among slightly later recruits are Dirk Delabastita (Leuven and subsequently Namur), Saliha Paker (Istanbul), Theresa Hyun (Seoul, Toronto) and others.

The early years saw the emergence of a personal network and the elaboration of a consensus on key ideas. Bearing the ‘invisible college’ model in mind, it is striking that despite their international dispersion members of the network share a number of obvious features. All have been involved in university-based research and possess a background in literary studies, with an active interest in comparative literature and literary history. The growth of the paradigm also coincided with personal career patterns. Of the old guard, Even-Zohar, Lefevere, Van den Broeck and Lambert had gained their doctorates around 1970 with dissertations on either translation or comparative literature topics. Around the mid 1970s they could still be regarded as young Turks, eager to make their mark. All the others mentioned in the previous paragraph obtained their PhD degrees in the course of the 1970s or later, and most went on to tenure tracks and professorial chairs in the 1980s and ‘90s. Clearly, the diffusion of the paradigm owes much to this upward academic mobility and the opportunities created by it.

In the paradigm’s early, formative stages most of the key texts, including Even-Zohar’s Papers in Historical Poetics (1979) and Toury’s In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980) as well as the three collections of conference papers, appeared in quite obscure publications. This made group solidarity doubly important, in the form of cross-referencing, joint editing or writing ventures and a collective profile. It also contributed to the atmosphere within the network, whose members preferred to see themselves as radical, innovative, combative and theoretically sophisticated. The example of the Russian Formalist circles was never far away. Lambert and Lefevere were aware of the Russian Formalist writings which had reached the West in the 1960s; Even-Zohar would quote them in Russian. Individuals brought their own expertise and interests: Even-Zohar had his polysystem hypothesis, Toury his empirical emphasis, Lambert a large-scale research project on translation history, Lefevere a preoccupation with philosophy of science, and Holmes a synthetic view spanning the theory and practice of translation. The chemistry worked.

Expansion followed. Susan Bassnett’s introductory Translation Studies (1980, revised 1991), which became popular, bore traces of the new approach; its index featured Holmes, Lefevere, Levý and Popovič, alongside more traditional names like Catford and Eugene Nida, as the modern translation scholars most frequently mentioned. In 1985 The Manipulation of L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the Routledge Translation Classics edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preamble: Mann’s fate
• 1 An invisible college
• 2 Lines of approach
• 3 Points of orientation
• 4 Undefining translation
• 5 Describing translation
• 6 Working with norms
• 7 Beyond norms
• 8 Into Systems
• 9 More systems?
• 10 Translation as system
• 11 Criticisms
• 12 Perspectives
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index