The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms Or Shifting Viewpoints?

<DOCINFO AUTHOR ""TITLE "The Turns of Translation Studies: New paradigms or shifting viewpoints?"SUBJECT "Benjamins Translation Library, Volume 66"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "160"VOFFSET "4"> The Turns of Translation Studies Benjamins Translation Library The Benjamins Translation Library aims to stimulate research and training in translation and interpreting studies. The Library provides a forum for a variety of approaches (which may sometimes be conﬂicting) in a socio-cultural, historical, theoretical, applied and pedagogical context. The Library includes scholarly works, reference works, post-graduate text books and readers in the English language. EST Subseries The European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Subseries is a publication channel within the Library to optimize EST’s function as a forum for the translation and interpreting research community. It promotes new trends in research, gives more visibility to young scholars’ work, publicizes new research methods, makes available documents from EST, and reissues classical works in translation studies which do not exist in English or which are now out of print. General editor Associate editor Honorary editor Yves Gambier Miriam Shlesinger Gideon Toury University of Turku Bar Ilan University Tel Aviv University Advisory board Rosemary Arrojo Werner Koller Sherry Simon Binghamton University Bergen University Concordia University Michael Cronin Alet Kruger Mary Snell-Hornby Dublin City University UNISA, South Africa University of Vienna Daniel Gile José Lambert Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit Université Lumière Lyon 2 Catholic University of Leuven University of Joensuu Ulrich Heid John Milton Maria Tymoczko University of Stuttgart University of Sao Paulo University of Massachusetts Amparo Hurtado Albir Franz Pöchhacker Amherst Universitat Autónoma de University of Vienna Lawrence Venuti Barcelona Anthony Pym Temple University W. John Hutchins Universitat Rovira i Virgilli University of East Anglia Rosa Rabadán Zuzana Jettmarová University of León Charles University of Prague Volume 66 The Turns of Translation Studies: New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? by Mary Snell-Hornby The Turns of Translation Studies New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? Mary Snell-Hornby University of Vienna John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements 8 of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mary Snell-Hornby The Turns of Translation Studies : New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? / Mary Snell-Hornby. p. cm. (Benjamins Translation Library, issn 0929–7316 ; v. 66) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Translating and interpreting--Research--History. P306.5.S64 2006 418/.02072--dc22 2006045870 isbn 90 272 1673 8 (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 90 272 1674 6 (Pb; alk. paper) © 2006 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Es gibt dreierlei Arten Leser: eine, die ohne Urteil genießt, eine dritte, die ohne zu genießen urteilt, die mittlere, die genießend urteilt und urteilend genießt; diese reproduziert eigentlich ein Kunstwerk aufs neue. (There are three kinds of reader: the first are those who enjoy without judging, the third those who judge without enjoying; the middle group judge with enjoyment and enjoy with judgement, and they actually reproduce a work of art anew.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 13th June 1819 Table of Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 chapter 1 Translation Studies: The emergence of a discipline 5 1.1 Great precursors 6 1.2 Paving the way: From Jakobson to Paepcke 20 1.3 The pragmatic turn in linguistics 35 1.4 The legacy of James Holmes 40 chapter 2 The cultural turn of the 1980s 47 2.1 Descriptive Translation Studies: The “Manipulation School” revisited 47 2.2 The skopos theory and its functional approach 51 2.3 The model of translatorial action 56 2.4 Deconstruction, or the “cannibalistic” approach 60 2.5 The 1980s in retrospect 63 chapter 3 The “interdiscipline” of the 1990s 69 3.1 Beyond language 70 3.1.1 Of norms, memes and ethics 72 3.1.2 Translation and nonverbal communication 79 3.1.3 Translating multimodal texts 84 3.2 “Imperial eyes” 90 3.2.1 Postcolonial translation 92 3.2.2 Gender-based Translation Studies 100 3.3 The positions of the reader 104 3.3.1 Applying a functional model of translation critique 109 chapter 4 The turns of the 1990s 115 4.1 The empirical turn 115 VIII The Turns of Translation Studies 4.1.1 New fields of interpreting studies 116 4.1.2 Empirical studies in translation 123 4.2 The globalization turn 128 4.2.1 Technology and the translator 130 4.2.2 Translation and advertising 134 4.2.3 The empire of English 139 4.3 Venuti’s foreignization: A new paradigm? 145 chapter 5 At the turn of the millenium: State of the discipline 149 5.1 The U-turns – back to square one? 150 5.2 New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? 159 5.3 “Make dialogue, not war”: Moving towards a “translation turn”. 164 chapter 6 Translation Studies – future perspectives 171 References 177 Subject index 199 Author index 203 Preface When I was asked by John Benjamins a few years ago whether I would consider presenting the book Translation Studies. An Integrated Approach (1988, 19952) in a third revised edition, I spontaneously answered that I would rather write a completely new book. So much had meanwhile changed in Translation Studies that a revision would even then have been completely inadequate. Up to the mid-1980s, when the volume was compiled, the study of translation was still widely seen as a concern of either linguistics or literary studies, and my “integrated approach” set out to overcome the divisions between them and to present Translation Studies as an independent discipline. The response to that volume indicates that it served its purpose. Seen from today’s viewpoint, it seems that most accounts of the study of translation in those years were one-sided or fragmentary, mainly because what have meanwhile proved to be seminal works were often barely accessible: the confer- ence papers of James Holmes are an outstanding example. In the meantime the discipline now institutionalized as Translation Studies has branched out in several directions, and a new perspective is needed to do it justice. This present book sets out to offer a critical assessment of such developments, concentrating on the last twenty years and focussing on what have turned out to be ground-breaking contributions (new paradigms) as against what may be seen in retrospect to have been only a change in position on already established territory (shifting viewpoints). Obviously, the borders are hazy (as in the earlier book we shall be thinking in terms of prototypes and not in rigid categories), and much is controversial, depending on the viewpoint of the scholar or reader: my aim is to stimulate discussion and to provoke further debate on the current profile and future perspectives of Translation Studies. While endeavouring to view the discipline in the broad international perspective of today, I am aware that my viewpoint is a European one, and that any conclu- sions must by necessity be relative. The same however goes for any study of such a complex subject, even those which claim general – or global – validity. And here the use of English as a world-wide language of publication presents problems: there has been a disquieting trend in recent years for English to be used, not only as a means of communication, but also as part of the object of discussion (see 4.2.3). English publications frequently have a clear Anglo-American bias, and X The Turns of Translation Studies what are presented as general principles of translation sometimes prove to be limited to the area under discussion and to be caused by the specific status of English (cf. 4.3). Conversely, contributions written in languages other than English and on topics outside Anglophile interests tend to be ignored or over-simplified. The same goes for schools of thought or even entire traditions. After living and work- ing in German-speaking countries for over forty years, I have become very aware of the complexity and wealth of the German tradition in translation over the cen- turies, also of the part played by the German-speaking scientific community in Translation Studies over the last twenty years, and of how inadequately all this is treated in the English-speaking Translation Studies debate. The only work I have read in English which does justice to the historical German tradition is André Lefevere’s 1977 volume Translating Literature. The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig, which is taken here as our starting-point. No discipline (or school of thought or individual scholarly investigation) arises in a vacuum, and it is often overlooked that much of the new paradigm of Translation Studies was (re)oriented against the older tradition (two names, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Walter Ben- jamin, were to be rediscovered in the US debate via English translation). A similar fate has befallen much work written in German – and languages other than English – over the last twenty years: when included in the English-speaking discussion, it is often over-simplified or the selection is limited to isolated work which happens to be available in English translation. This present profile of Trans- lation Studies aims at correcting that deficit and will highlight such contributions alongside those more familiar through English publications. Every effort is made to situate all contributions in their specific historical or cultural context, and as far as possible the scholars concerned are cited in direct quotation, where necessary alongside the English translations (these, unless otherwise indicated, are mine).

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