Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

main points
covered in this chapter are:
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Descriptive Translation Studies developed from a tradition in which objective 
scientific methods were applied to cultural products.
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Those methods were often applied to translation by literary scholars working in 
smaller cultures. 
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Rather than prescribe what a good translation should be like, descriptive 
approaches try to say what translations are like or could be like. 

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Translation shifts are regular differences between translations and their source 
texts. They can be analyzed top-down or bottom-up.
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Translations play a role in the development of cultural systems. 
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The innovative or conservative position of translations within a cultural system 
depends on the system’s relation with other systems, and may correlate with the 
type of translation strategy used. 
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When selecting texts to study, translations can be considered facts of target 
culture only, as opposed to the source-culture context that is predominant in the 
equivalence paradigm. 
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Translators’ performances are regulated by collective “norms,” based on 
informal consensus about what is to be expected from a translator.
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The descriptive approach was instrumental in organizing Translation Studies as 
an academic discipline with an empirical basis. 
5.1 What happened to equivalence
Equivalence went out of fashion. German-language 
Skopostheorie
made it even more 
unfashionable by arguing that since “functional consistency” (the closest thing they had 
to equivalence) was no more than one of many possible requirements, translation 
usually requires transformations of a rather more radical kind. For those theorists, 
equivalence became quite a small thing, a special case. At almost the same time, 
however, other theorists were dismantling equivalence in precisely the opposite way. 
For this second very broad group, for what