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Descriptive Translation Studies

THEO HERMANS
The academic discipline of translation studies is of relatively recent date. While there
has been profound and critical thought about matters of translation throughout history,
traditionally much of it was ad hoc, evaluative, and concerned with particular genres such
as literature or sacred texts. Sustained attention to translation in an academic context did
not begin until around the mid-20th century, when, as a result of technological and socioeconomic developments, the volume of translations increased substantially, especially in
the industrialized world, and consequently the need arose to train professional translators.
The first generation of academically trained translation scholars consisted primarily of
linguists involved in translator training. In the 1970s and 1980s descriptive translation
studies reacted against the prescriptive and exclusively linguistic outlook of that generation.
Since then descriptivism has entered the mainstream of translation studies, and has in turn
been challenged by more recent approaches.
Although the descriptivist paradigm in the study of translation is neither theoretically
nor methodologically united, its main features may be summarized as an interest in translation
as part of cultural history, a focus on translations as historical products, a preoccupation
with literary translation, the adoption of a broadly functionalist framework, and a desire
to contextualize and to valorize translation as a cultural practice.
This entry first explains the emergence of the descriptive paradigm in translation studies
and then addresses specific aspects and developments. It concludes with an account of
challenges and criticisms.

The Emergence of Descriptive Translation Studies


As early as 1953 John McFarlane, in an essay voicing unhappiness with the relentlessly
judgmental nature of translation criticism, suggested that the study of translation might
be conceived differently if it focused on empirical data and on explanation rather than on
evaluation. The approach he recommended would be diagnostic rather than hortatory
(1953, p. 93). Analysis, McFarlane proposed, should start from the assumption that translation is as translation does and from an examination of what translation is and can be
rather than what it ought to be but never is (1953, pp. 923).
The essay went unnoticed at the time, and translation continued to be considered mostly
in terms either of structural linguistics or of source-oriented literary criticism. McFarlanes
ideas were not picked up until the early 1970s, when the Amsterdam-based American
translator and researcher James Holmes brought together different groups of scholars in
Western and Central Europe and in Israel who were thinking along similar lines. The
Czech scholar Jii Levn had compared translating to decision making in formal games,
and sought to understand individual translations as reflecting different national or historical poetics and conventions (Levn, 1969). The Slovak scholar Anton Popovig (1976)
viewed literary translation as involving a confrontation between the aesthetic conventions
of the donor and of the receptor culture, resulting in inevitable shifts in meaning and
expression. In Belgium Jos Lambert (1985) and Andr Lefevere (1982) engaged in projects
studying translations in their historical contexts. Holmes himself wrote on different ways
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0315

descriptive translation studies

in which poetry could be translated and on such things as the temporal gap separating
originals and translations. His key contribution was the 1972 essay The Name and Nature
of Translation Studies (Holmes, 1988, pp. 6780), in which he proposed a name for the
discipline, that is, translation studies (rather than, say, translatology), and surveyed its
various branches, emphasizing the primacy of theoretical and descriptive research and
relegating practical applications, criticism, and translator training to a secondary position.
Meanwhile in Israel Itamar Even-Zohar (1978; revised 1990) was developing a stratified
theory of literature as a polysystem that would be able to accommodate traditionally
marginalized phenomena such as popular fiction, childrens literature, and also translated
literature. Another Israeli, Gideon Toury (1980; revised 1995), was attempting a general
theory of translation from an explicitly empirical viewpoint.
Personal connections were forged during a series of small-scale conferences held in
Belgium and Israel in 1976, 1978, and 1980. They gave rise to what Diana Crane (1972) has
called an invisible college, an international network of like-minded researchers. A collection entitled The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (Hermans, 1985)
presented the descriptive approach to the wider community as a new paradigm, complete
with a programmatic introduction and case studies.
Descriptivism was by no means the only innovation in translation studies in the 1970s
and 1980s. In Germany Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer (1984) developed a strongly
functionalist view of translation as an alternative to the dominance of linguistically inspired
approaches. These were themselves undergoing what Mary Snell-Hornby (1986) termed a
pragmatic turn, more concerned with actual language use than with abstract linguistic
structures. In the mid-1980s a group of researchers at the University of Gttingen began
to produce a series of detailed studies geared primarily to literary translation into German
from the 18th century onwards; they termed their approach descriptive-historical, and
engaged in a critical dialogue with the descriptivists gathered under the Manipulation
banner (Schultze, 1987; Frank, 1989; Kittel & Frank, 1991; Kittel, 1992; Lnker, 1992;
Poltermann, 1995).

Translation and Description


Since descriptivist researchers were keen to engage with actual translations, they did not
want to waste time on attempts to define translation. James Holmes (1988, pp. 235)
invoked Wittgensteins idea of family resemblances to suggest the flexibility and openendedness of concepts of translation across culturesan idea that recently has been revived
as a way of exploring translation in a global context (Tymoczko, 2007). Gideon Toury
sidestepped the problem of definition by declaring that translation was whatever was
regarded or accepted as translation in a given community at a particular time (1980,
p. 43). Although this was a nominalist stance that begged more questions than it resolved,
it meant that research could get underway without being paralyzed by issues of definition
and delimitation.
Strictly speaking the descriptive label was a misnomer. It caught only one aspect of the
new paradigm: its opposition to a prescriptive approach and, consequently, its unwillingness to evaluate translations. But descriptivism was more than that. It insisted on the study
of translation as a discipline in its own right, regardless of possible applications in translator training, and despite the indifference of most literary studies to translated literature.
At the same time, descriptive researchers were intent on doing more than merely describing.
They sought to contextualize and to explain; some even wanted to arrive at predictions
and generalizations, on the model of the sciences. Most, however, were content to engage
with the history of translation and to develop methodological tools to do so.

descriptive translation studies

Harald Kittel formulated the guiding questions for translation research as who translated
what, when, why and in what way, and why in this particular way? (Kittel, 1988, p. 160; Frank,
1989, p. 6). At the methodological level several techniques designed to capture and tag the
relation between originals and translations were tried and tested, but all ran into problems
due to the need to interpret rather than merely log meanings, forms, and translation shifts.
Despite these hermeneutic difficulties, a great deal of historical research, much of it
focused on literary texts and their translations, was generated. As a result, traditional
concepts like that of equivalence were questioned, and attention turned instead to the
conditioning factors of individual translations and the impact of translations on their
environment. As the discipline gained academic respectability and project funding became
available, larger bodies of work could be investigated. Looking at series of translations
over longer periods rather than as isolated cases revealed regularities and patterns in the
work of individual translators or of particular groups, periods, or genres. The concept of
translation norms, which Levn and Popovig had already employed and Toury elaborated
further, proved useful as a means of accounting for the preferential choices which translators appeared to make again and again. Beyond the concept of norms lay the value systems
binding collectives together. The significance of the concept of translation norms, then,
consisted not so much in the role of norms as constraints limiting the individual translators
freedom of action, but rather in the window they opened for researchers to gain insight
into the conditioning of translation in different social, cultural, and ideological contexts.
This meant a widening of the horizons of translation studies, and the importance of
descriptivism for translation studies lies in its contribution to these intellectual developments. One line of inquiry led to the historicizing of translation concepts and practices,
and hence to a recognition of their diversity, contingency, and historical embedding.
Whereas some early descriptivist studies entertained hopes of formulating universal, immanent laws of translation, the historicizing of translation pointed in the opposite direction
and suggested an understanding of translation as a cultural construct bound to specific
communities, times, and locations. The principles governing the encounter with historically
remote periods could subsequently be projected onto studies dealing with translation
across geographical and cultural divides (Hermans, 2006).
Parallel to the engagement with history there was a branching out into other forms of
translation, including interpreting and audiovisual media. Here, too, early work had tended
to be prescriptive or, in the case of interpreting, concerned with linguistic and cognitive
factors. The focus gradually shifted to a consideration of contextual elements and questions
of agency (Esselink, 2000; Pchhacker & Shlesinger, 2002; Daz Cintas & Remael, 2007).
Another line led to the role of moral, political, religious, and other factors that shape
the production and reception of translations. This type of work was instrumental in bringing about what was called, in 1990, the cultural turn in translation studies (Bassnett &
Lefevere, 1990). The cultural turn resulted not only in a contextualization of translation
as a social and cultural practice, but also in an outlook that saw translation as just one
practice among other forms of transmission and migration of cultural goods. Symptomatic
in this respect was the work of Andr Lefevere, who in the course of the 1980s abandoned
Even-Zohars idea of a literary polysystem and its formalist and structuralist ambience,
and instead developed his own theory of what he called rewriting (Lefevere, 1992). The
term covered a broad swathe of phenomena from anthologizing to criticism, in addition
to translation. Lefeveres emphasis on patronage and ideology in the historical manifestations of various kinds of rewriting brought into view larger social networks as well as
political factors and power differentials. This emphasis aligned with postcolonial studies,
with studies stressing the role of translation in shaping cultural identity, and with the
burgeoning sociology of translation.

descriptive translation studies

Although corpus-based translation research has not worked with the concept of norms
in any significant way, its approach is entirely compatible with the descriptive paradigm,
and indeed corpus-based studies often position themselves as an extension of descriptive
work. Much early corpus-based research, whether it used parallel or comparable corpora
(i.e., sets of translated and untranslated texts, or pairs of originals and their translations),
was intent on discovering patterns and regularities within or across genres. More recently
questions of style, evaluation, and point of view have also been explored with the use of
corpus tools (Olohan, 2004).
Just as working with large computerized corpora led to new and different questions
being asked, so the widening of horizons which descriptivism brought about in translation
studies led to its transformation. As it began to tackle not just literary printed texts but
audiovisual media, and as it spread beyond Europe and North America, its complexion
changed. What was once a limited, distinct paradigm defined by its opposition to prescriptive
studies and evaluative criticism has become a mainstream direction in translation research.
While descriptivism broadened and deepened, it also absorbed criticism, primarily from
postcolonial and deconstructive angles (Niranjana, 1992; Hermans, 1999). Deconstructive
critics attacked descriptivisms neat separation of object-level and meta-level, and the
illusion of value-free research. Postcolonial scholars pointed out the descriptivists initial
blindness to questions of power, the restriction to Western canonical literature, the unthinking application of Western theoretical models to other cultures, and the failure to recognize
that the study of translation, like translation itself, was an ideologically conditioned cultural
practice. These debates continue. However, they are now no longer about descriptivism
as such; they concern the study of translation as a self-reflexive discipline in a global
context.
SEE ALSO: Cognitive Approaches to Translation; Cultural Approaches to Translation;
Functional Approaches to Translation; History of Translation; Linguistic Approaches to
Translation; Literary Translation; Sociological Approaches to Translation; Text-Based
Approaches to Translation; Translation Theory

References
Bassnett, S., & Lefevere, A. (Eds.). (1990). Translation, history and culture. London, England: Pinter.
Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges: Diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Daz Cintas, J., & Remael, A. (2007). Audiovisual translation: Subtitling. Manchester, England:
St. Jerome.
Esselink, B. (2000). A practical guide to localization. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins
Even-Zohar, I. (1978). Papers in historical poetics. Tel Aviv, Israel: Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
Even-Zohar, I. (1990). Polysystem studies (Special issue). Poetics Today, 11(1).
Frank, A. P. (Ed.). (1989). Der lange Schatten kurzer Geschichten: Amerikanische Kurzprosa in deutschen
bersetzungen. Berlin, Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Hermans, T. (Ed.). (1985). The manipulation of literature: Studies in literary translation. London,
England: Croom Helm.
Hermans, T. (1999). Translation in systems: Descriptive and systemic approaches explained. Manchester,
England: St. Jerome.
Hermans, T. (Ed.). (2006). Translating others (2 vols.). Manchester, England: St. Jerome.
Holmes, J. (1988). Translated! Papers on literary translation and translation studies. Amsterdam,
Netherlands: Rodopi.

descriptive translation studies

Kittel, H. (Ed.). (1988). Die literarische bersetzung: Stand und Perspektiven ihrer Erforschung. Berlin,
Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Kittel, H. (Ed.). (1992). Geschichte, System, Literarische bersetzung/Histories, systems, literary translations. Berlin, Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Kittel, H., & Frank, A. P. (Eds.). (1991). Interculturality and the historical study of literary translations.
Berlin, Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Lambert, J. (1985). Translated literature in France, 18001850. In T. Hermans (Ed.), The manipulation
of literature (pp. 14963). London, England: Croom Helm.
Lefevere, A. (1982). Mother Courages cucumbers. Text, system and refraction in a theory of
literature. Modern Language Studies, 12(4), 320.
Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, rewriting and the manipulation of literary fame. London, England:
Routledge.
Levn, J. (1969). Die literarische bersetzung: Theorie einer Kunstgattung (W. Schamschula, Trans.).
Frankfurt, Germany: Athenum. (Original work published 1963)
Lnker, F. (Ed.). (1992). Die literarische bersetzung als Medium der Fremderfahrung. Berlin, Germany:
Erich Schmidt.
McFarlane, J. (1953). Modes of translation. Durham University Journal, 45(3), 7793.
Niranjana, T. (1992). Siting translation: History, post-structuralism and the colonial context. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Olohan, M. (2004). Introducing corpora in translation studies. London, England: Routledge.
Pchhacker, F., & Shlesinger, M. (Eds.). (2002). The interpreting studies reader. London, England:
Routledge.
Poltermann, A. (Ed.). (1995). LiteraturkanonMedienereignisKultureller Text: Formen interkultureller Kommunikation und bersetzung. Berlin, Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Popovig, A. (1976). Dictionary for the analysis of literary translation. Edmonton: University of
Alberta.
Reiss, K., & Vermeer, H. (1984) Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tbingen,
Germany: Niemeyer.
Schultze, B. (Ed.). (1987). Die literarische bersetzung: Fallstudien zu ihrer Kulturgeschichte. Berlin,
Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Snell-Hornby, M. (Ed.). (1986). bersetzungswissenschaft: Eine Neuorientierung. Tbingen, Germany:
Francke.
Toury, G. (1980). In search of a theory of translation. Tel Aviv, Israel: Porter Institute for Poetics
and Semiotics.
Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John
Benjamins.
Tymoczko, M. (2007). Enlarging translation, empowering translators. Manchester, England:
St. Jerome.

Suggested Readings
Frank, A. P., Maass, K-J., Fritz F., & Turk, H. (Eds.). (1993). bersetzen, verstehen, Brcken bauen:
Geisteswissenschaftliches und literarisches bersetzen im internationalen Kulturaustausch (2 vols.).
Berlin, Germany: Erich Schmidt.
Holmes, J. (Ed.). (1970). The nature of translation: Essays on the theory and practice of literary translation. The Hague, Netherlands: De Gruyter.
Lambert, J. (2006). Functional approaches to culture and translation: Selected papers. (D. Delabastita,
L. Dhulst, & R. Meylaerts, Eds.). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Pym, A., Shlesinger, M., & Simeoni, D. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond descriptive translation studies:
Investigations in homage to Gideon Toury. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

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