Gideon Toury would eventually construct
as “Descriptive Translation Studies,”
equivalence was a feature of all translations ,
simply because they were thought to be translations, no matter what their linguistic or
aesthetic quality (cf. Toury 1980: 63-70). That changed everything. If equivalence was
suddenly everywhere in translations, or almost, it could no longer be used to support
any linguistics that would help people create it, nor could the concept directly serve the
prescriptive training of translators. Translation Studies was thus moved into a realm that
was relatively unprotected by any parent discipline; it had to become its own discipline.
The descriptive approach emphasized the need to carry out research on translation,
mostly research of the kind done in structuralist literary studies, rather than expound
principles and opinions. The theories associated with the research were thus positioned
problematically out of touch with the growing number of training institutions; they were
in an institutional context quite different from that of
Skopostheorie . Here we will
follow the adventures of that historical move. In the following chapter we will consider
what the descriptions might actually have discovered.
5.2 Origins of the descriptive paradigm The name “
Descriptive Translation Studies ” (with the capitals) was never fully
consecrated as such until Gideon Toury’s book
Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond (1995; Spanish translation 2004). It has since become a flag of convenience for
a loose flotilla of innovative scholars. Around that particular name there is now a rather
large body of thought and research. On the surface, this would seem to be a general
paradigm in which scholars have set out to
