Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

systematic
(ordered, thorough, complete), 
but not necessarily 
systemic
(in the sense that might be related to a system where all 
terms in some way depend on all other terms).
If we were talking about a 
language system
(as in the work of the systemic 
functionalist Halliday, for example), we would see the speaker producing a string of 
words such that at each point there is a 
restricted
set of what words can follow. The 
language system limits the choices that can be made. The same is true of the translator 
as a language producer, since the target language imposes limited sets of choices, which 
vary as we go about doing the translation. However, does the same kind of decision-
making concern how to render a foreign verse form? The translator may certainly select 
one of Holmes’s five options, and that choice might have meaning in terms of the 
overall history of European verse forms, yet is it a decision like those where we are 
obliged to select a certain kind of verb or adverbial? Is it properly systemic? To a 
certain extent, yes: all receiving cultures have literary genres, and they mostly maintain 
structural relations between themselves. Then again, no: those sets of genres need bear 
no resemblance at all to the five translational alternatives outlined by Holmes. The 
receiving culture is one thing; the sets of theoretical alternatives are something quite 
different. In this case, the kind of choice process outlined by Holmes surely cannot be 
considered a psychological reality. If the translator was working into German at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, there were all kinds of social and cultural factors 
that not only made the use of mimetic form appropriate, but also made Holmes’s 
alternatives relatively invisible. Germanic culture, without a state, was prepared to draw 
on other cultures in order to develop. Translations of Homer brought hexameters into 
German, and translations of Shakespeare brought in blank verse. Indeed, speaking in 
1813, Schleiermacher saw this capacity to draw from other cultures as the key to 
foreignizing translations, regarded as being a particularly Germanic strategy. A literary 
translator trained in that cultural environment would then see “mimetic form” or 
“foreignizing” as the 
normal
way to go about translation. The translator might even see 
it as the true or correct way in which all translations should be done, in all sociocultural 
environments. Prescriptive theorizing may result (“All translations should use mimetic 

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form!”); some structural oppositions might be proclaimed in theory (“German mimetic 
form is better than French translations into prose!”); but the choices are not made within 
an abstract system comprising purely translational options.
As 
Toury
would later clarify (1995a: 15-16), the system here belongs to the 
level of the theorist (the options 
theoretically
available), which is to be distinguished 
from the alternatives actually available to the translator at the time of translating, which 
are in turn quite different from what the translator actually does. Toury thus 
distinguishes between three levels of analysis: “all that translation […] 
CAN
involve,” 
“what it 
DOES
involve, under various sets of circumstances,” and “what is it 
LIKELY
to 
involve, under one or another array of specified conditions” (1995a: 15)