Translation Studies as an Empirical Discipline

It’s well known that, today, Gideon Toury’s redefinition of translation as an empirical phenomenon is considered among the most popular of such attempts aiming to free the discipline from its ‘speculative’ impression. As seen in the Bibliographies of the current research in the field, both the exemplary methodology and the conceptual tools offered keep providing a fruitful framework and a sound approach. Just like Even-Zohar’s ‘repertoire’, ‘central-peripheral’, ‘primary-secondary’ etc, today, Toury’s ‘norms’ and ‘laws’ are the mostly referred concepts within studies that take translation as a cultural phenomena.

In Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Toury follows a rather systematic path in siting translation on empirical grounds. Heading from establishing interrelations between the sub-branches of Holmes’s map, Toury bestows the descriptive branch with a pivotal position and embarks upon problematizing the internal organization of this branch. As also frequently emphasized in the next chapters, one can’t conduct a function, product or process oriented study in isolation since these all the determinants of one another and work for the construction of the bigger picture- that is the conception of translation within the particular culture- which is the main concern of Toury. He establishes these types of interdependencies between various concepts concerning the field in order to reveal translation’s being a complex cultural phenomenon necessitating a deeper focus on the empirical level.

‘It’s only through DTS that hypothesis could be tested’ says Toury; by doing so, he puts a rational behind the importance he adheres to the descriptive branch of the discipline. Afterwards, comes his exemplary methodology for such empirical research: heading from the product, the interrelations, specific conditions, norms, and ultimately laws will be driven out. As seen, the researcher is expected to show a progress from empirical to the hypothetical level. It should be stated that, in Toury’s theory, all descriptive study (that involves defining interrelations, deriving regularities of behavior, searchig for motivations and constraints) works for a hypothesis of a higher and more general level. However much the importance of particular is stressed, those particulars are aimed to form a general unity. One shouldn’t forget that, there are still implications of a general theory of translation in Toury’s theory, which departs him from contemporary scholars of ‘power turn’ that embrace ‘heterogenity’ in a different manner.

Since an analysis ofan empirical research starts from the product, it’s the target text- or ‘assumed translation’ in Toury’s terms- that the research begins with. Together with this fact, it’s the ultimate aim’s being ‘deriving out what is concerned as translational in target culture’ that makes Toury’s approach target-oriented. There are initial assumptions that the researcher take for granted in approaching the product:

'...an assumed translation would be regarded as any target-culture text for which there are reasons to tentatively posit the existence of another text, in another culture and language, from which it was presumedly derived by transfer operations and to which it is now tied by certain relationships, some of which may be regarded- within that culture- as necessary and/or sufficient.' (Toury 1995: 35)

With these assumptions in mind, the process of analysis starts. First the individual text is studied (here the question of what makes the text a translation in that particular culture/context is asked), then comes the comparative analysis and the establishment of possible relations between the source and target texts, and finally, generalizations concerning the whole process are formulated. (As seen, there’s a transition from a retrospective perspective to the prospective one here: first form the existing product, the regularities of behavior are deriven out, then comes the generalizations and possible guidelines for future behavior) In this three-phased process, the main (and perhaps only) stage of the traditional approach- that is the comparison- seems to be subordinated to contextualization. However, later problematizations of the concept of ‘equivalence’ within the book reveal that Toury has actually put great effort in overcoming the circularities brought by the traditional binaries and especially the notion of equivalence. Although ‘equivalence’ is shown simply as ‘the norm of pair of texts’- one of the million norms- the peculiar focus on it reveals that it isn’t as insignificant of a deal.

Firstly, as all other norms, equivalence is historical and can’t be focused in isolation (without being located into the context). And it is also, as other norms, a medium between the product and the general hypothesis driven out of its analysis: Through observing the similarities between the equivalence relations within a large corpus of translated texts, the researcher ends up with some answers(‘why certain decisions are made in other similar texts?’, ‘why certain target-source relations are prioritized over others?’ etc), and therefore, arrives at general hypothetical formulations. From this perspective, equivalence is solely one of the norms defined by Toury as a ‘stepping stone that is of little importance itself’. On the other hand, since it is described as the main tool of of ‘distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate modes of translation performance for the culture in question’ (1995: 86), and since the upmost aim of this empirical research proposed by Toury is defined as ‘deriving out appropriate translational behavior in a certain context’, it doesn’t seem to be such an insignificant concern of the translation phenomena, even for Toury.

Overall, the framework provided by DTS of Toury is of great importance, especially in terms of its applicability in scholarly work. Heading from the translation product to derive constraints and motives behind translation, regularities of behavior, and relational priorities bestows it with a pivotal position within the grand translational scheme. The absence of such popular terms of today’s traslation theory as power/agent/ideology opens the theory to criticisms; still, as in Even-Zohar’s systemic approach, this theory doesn’t reject the existence of them, therefore doesn’t postulate an inconsistency with Toury’s later works that involves such components. Perhaps, instead of that, it’d be misleading to take this theory as the one that totally transcends the source-target binary and the notion of equivalence. Although there’s a great emphasis on the target text (and justifications of such cases in which no source text exists), one of the three assumptions within an assumed translation is ‘the existence of a source’. It’s still through a comparative analysis of the textual segments that the researcher acquires empirical information which would take her/him to a general formulation. And equivalence is still a highly problematized notion regarding the phenomena of translation. What’s new in Toury is that establishing the equivalence relationship or finding shifts isn’t the last phase of a research (though they can be taken as the last ‘empirical phase’).

References
Toury, Gideon
1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond