Descriptive2

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)

Descriptive1

Here Holmes uses ‘translating’ for the process and ‘translation’ for the product. The
descriptions and generalized principles envisaged were much reinforced by Gideon
Toury in his Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995) where two tentative
general ‘laws’ of translation are proposed:
1. the law of growing standardization – TTs generally display less linguistic
variation than STs, and
2. the law of interference – common ST lexical and syntactic patterns tend to be
copied, creating unusual patterns in the TT.
In both instances, the contention is that translated language in general displays
specific characteristics, known as universals of translation.

phonetics

The study of speech sounds is called phonetics.

Ideology and translation

For Hatim and Mason, ideology encompasses ‘the tacit assumptions, beliefs
and value systems which are shared collectively by social groups’ (1997:144).
They make a distinction between ‘the ideology of translating’ and ‘the
translation of ideology’.Whereas the former refers to the basic orientation

chosen by the translator operating within a social and cultural context (the
choice, for example, between Venuti’s domesticating and foreignizing
translation), in the translation of ideology they examine the extent of
mediation supplied by a translator of sensitive texts.‘Mediation’ is defined as
‘the extent to which translators intervene in the transfer process, feeding their
own knowledge and beliefs into processing the text’ (Hatim and Mason 1997:
147). In many ways this is a parallel to the translator’s discursive presence in
literary texts discussed in Unit 12.

task2

Translation shifts
In Section A of this unit, we looked at the concept of translation shift and at
some of the taxonomies that have been proposed for describing the changes that
occur in a specific ST–TT pair. The readings in this section are from perhaps the
most noted theorists in this area:J ohn Catford, who was the first to use the term
‘translation shift’ in his A Linguistic Theory of Translation, published in 1965; and
Jean Vinay and Jean-Paul Darbelnet, whose A Comparative Stylistics of French
and English (1958/1995) still remains the most comprehensive categorization of
differences between a pair of languages. The extract from Catford (Text B4.1),
describes the two kinds of translation shifts in his model: level shifts (between the
levels of grammar and lexis) and category shifts (unbounded and rank-bounded

Task B4.1.1
➤ Before you read Text B4.1, look back at Section A, Unit 4 and make sure you
are familiar with the term translation shift.
➤ What would you say would be the aim of translation shift analysis?
➤ What were some of the problems with shift analysis discussed at the end of
Section A of this unit? Do you agree that these really are problems?
➤ As you read the text below, make a list of examples of the different kinds
of shifts described by Catford. Note the difference between level shifts and
category shifts).