Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Probabilistic explanations in translation studies 23
5. Probabilistic thinking in translation studies
My starting point will be an observation I made in my 1976 doctoral dissertation
– a reservoir of half-baked ideas which may be worth returning to, from
time to time. As the observation was made in Hebrew, I will quote from an
English translation which is only partial:
By virtue of their definition as shifts from one focal point, [. . .], all shifts
fall into dichotomous pairs [. . .]. For instance, explicitation/implicitation,
addition/loss of information, generalization/concretization, etc. Consequently
[I said already then], it is possible to formulate the following rule: If ashift
occurs, it necessarily occurs in one direction – or in its complete
opposite. The selection of one of the two options, which in themselves are
given, to the extent that it is ordered [the selection, I mean], is governed by
translational norms.
(Toury 1987:6; bold-face added)
In those days, my work – theoretical, methodological and descriptive- explanatory
alike – was geared towards translational norms as a theoretical notion and
its use as a research tool, as well as the instantiation of such norms in a particular,
well-defined field. What I failed to do was to follow my observation
in any other direction. It was only in the 1990s that I realized it had something
of substance to offer in terms of a possible interim zone where universal
claims could maybe be made: non-trivial claims concerning regularities which
are there because it is translation that we are looking at.
Like translation involves shifts, a statement such as translation is
a norm-governed activity is analytic in nature. True, both had a certain
air of novelty when they were first made explicit and added as issues to our
scholarly agenda. However, whatever novelty they may have had, at the time,
it seems to have worn off completely. Consequently, it is not the notion of
norms itself that I wish to highlight here, but rather the idea that norms
govern translational selections between modes of behavior which point in two
diametrically opposite directions, involving pairsofshiftsofacomplementary
nature. It is the medial zero point which is the exception, that is, it has very low
probability, in most cases close to 0.
Had translational selections been random and their results, represented in
and by the translated texts, totally skewed, there would have been very little
one could do in terms of explanation, even if it were possible to come up with
neat descriptions of individual cases (which I am not all that sure of either).
Even clearer is it that there would be nothing one could contribute towards
making predictions, be it even the kind of ‘backward predictions’ researchers