shifts1

Task A4.3
➤ What means of comparison did you use when assessing shifts in Task A4.2
above? How objective do you feel this comparison was?
Attempts at objectifying the comparison have included van Leuven-Zwart’s
Architranseme concept where the dictionary meaning of the ST term was taken
as a comparator and used independently to evaluate the closeness of the ST and TT
term (van Leuven-Zwart 1989, 1990). However, the success of the Architranseme
rests upon the absolute objective dependability of the decontextualized dictionary
meaning and the analyst’s ability to accurately and repeatedly decide whether a
shift has occurred in the translation context. In view of the difficulty, not to say
impossibility, of achieving this, many theorists have moved away from the tertium
comparationis (see Snell-Hornby 1990). Gideon Toury is the Israeli scholar who
has been the prime proponent of Descriptive Translation Studies, a branch of the
discipline that sets out to describe translation by comparing and analysing ST–TT
pairs. In his work, Toury initially used a supposed ‘invariant’ as a form of comparison
(Toury 1980), but in his major work Descriptive Translation Studies – and
Beyond (Toury 1995) he drops this in favour of a more flexible ‘ad-hoc’ approach
to the selection of features, dependent on the characteristics of the specific texts
under consideration. Importantly, he warns against ‘the totally negative kind of
reasoning required by the search for shifts’ (Toury 1995:84) in which error and
failure and loss in translation are highlighted. Instead, for Toury translation shift
analysis is most valuable as a form of ‘discovery’, ‘a step towards the formulation of
explanatory hypotheses’ about the practice of translation (1995:85). The relevance
and applications of translation shifts are issues which we shall explore further in
Sections B and C

This unit describes a theoretical position that promotes the systematic analysis of
the changes that take place in moving from ST to TT. A change, known technically
as a ‘shift’, is generally any translation that moves away from formal correspondence.
Analysis normally first requires identification of the translation unit. The bestknown
work in this area is by Catford, who first used the term shift, and by Vinay
and Darbelnet, whose detailed taxonomy has influenced many theorists. But, as we
shall see in Unit 11, shifts also occur on the higher levels of text, genre and discourse..