Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

shifts of expression
” was also happening in roughly the same years as Catford (cf. 
Popovi
č
1968, 1970; Miko 1970) but the focus was not at all the same. For many of the 
Europeans, especially those coming from literary studies, shifts could be made quite 
independently of any simple desire to maintain equivalence. They could thus be 
approached in a top-down way, starting from major hypotheses about why they might 
exist and how they could form tendencies.
Popovi
č
, for instance, claimed that there are “two stylistic norms in the 
translator’s work: the norm of the original and the norm of the translation” (1968/70: 
82). This seems so simple as to be obvious. Yet consider the consequence: as soon as 
the two “
stylistic norms
” are announced, the multiplicity of shifts is already theorized 
in terms of coherent patterns (“norms” is a term we will meet further below). This kind 
of approach could connect quite easily with the study of literary stylistics, where one 
might see the two interacting “norms” as the voices of author and translator. On another 
level, shifts could be patterned differently because of historical factors (the nature of the 
receiving system, patronage, new text purpose, different ideas about what translation is, 
etc.). Or again, some shifts might come about simply as a result of the translation 
process as such (these would later be dubbed potential “universals”). On all those levels, 
the top-down approach to shifts seeks 
causal factors
(the reasons for the shifts) that are 
quite different from those of the equivalence paradigm. These descriptive approaches 
could obviously join forces with the bottom-up analyses carried out by linguists, but 
their theoretical frame was fundamentally different. In effect, despite the misnomer 
“descriptive,” these were theories about the possible causes (personal, institutional, 
historical) explaining why people translate differently.
As an example of the top-down analysis of historically bound translation shifts, 
consider the basic problem of what to do with a