level. For example, we could say that in the nineteenth century the norm for translating
foreign verse into French was to render it into prose. There was no official rule stating
that this had to be done, but there was an informal collective agreement. When
translators approached the foreign text, they would accept as a matter of course that
their work was not to imitate what the text looked or sounded like. When publishers
hired translators, that is what they expected them to do. And when readers approached a
literary translation, they would similarly accept that foreign poetry simply had to be in
prose. Of course, the norm was not respected by all translators; norms are not laws that
everyone has to follow. Norms are more like the common standard practice in terms of
which all other types of practice are marked. That much is relatively unproblematic.
Why did the norm of “verse into prose” exist? On several different levels, it no
doubt embodied the general idea that French culture was superior to other cultures. In
Toury’s terms, it conveyed at least that much of the society’s “general values and
ideas.” Given this assumed superiority, there was no reason to accept any foreign
influence on the existing system of neo-classical literary genres. In Even-Zohar’s terms,
we would say the perceived prestige of the target system allocated translation a
peripheral role and hence a very conservative range of acceptable forms. Further, if we
follow Toury, there would be some kind of social (though not juridical) penalization
involved whenever a translator did not adhere to the norm. For instance, a text that
differed radically from the established genres might be considered peculiar, ugly, or
simply not worth buying. In every culture, the nature of a good translation is determined
by such norms, since “bad translations” are penalized in some way, even if only by
hurling adjectives like “bad.” Of course, in milieux governed by an avant-garde logic,
the breaking of norms might mark a superior translation, rather than an inferior one.
Norm-breaking might thus mark not only translations that are bad, but also those that
are exceptionally good.
The concept of norms thus covers quite a few related but different things. Toury
(1995a: 58) makes a basic distinction between “
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