Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

relativism
would be a major point of compatibility with 
the 
Skopos
paradigm (and indeed with the paradigm of uncertainty that we will meet in 
a later chapter). However, the same relativism runs counter to much of the linguistic 
work done in the equivalence paradigm. When a linguist analyzes a source text to see 
how it can or should be translated, the basic assumption is that the answers will come 
from the nature of that source text, and the nature of translation is thus a very clear 
thing; there is not much relativism involved. In the 
Skopos
paradigm, the answers will 
come from the situation in which the translation is carried out, to the extent that it 
matters little whether a text is a translation or a liberal re-write. In the descriptive 
paradigm, however, any questions about the borders between translations and non-
translations can be answered in terms of norms, which in turn express values from the 
wider system within which the translator is working. In this sense, the theory of norms 
positions translation somewhere between the relative certainty of equivalence and the 
relative indifference of 
Skopos
theory.
Such comparisons of paradigms could be exploited in the 1980s, when the 
various approaches were starting to congeal into a tentative discipline called Translation 
Studies. Scholars working in the descriptive paradigm, usually with a background in 
literary studies, could legitimately criticize the narrow “prescriptive” work being done 
in the equivalence paradigm. How could a theory set out to tell someone how to 
translate, when the very notion of translation varied so much from epoch to epoch and 
from culture to culture? The call for descriptions was thus initially a more or less direct 
negation of the kind of 
prescription
associated with the equivalence paradigm. 
Similarly, whereas the equivalence paradigm invited analysis to start from the source 
text and its role in the source situation, the descriptive paradigm tended to favor the 
target
text and its position in the 
target
system. Toury (1995a) explicitly recommends