Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

Niklas Luhmann
(1985) describes legal norms as “
counterfactual 
expectations
,” in the sense that they do not take account of the way people actually 
behave. When these expectations are defeated (we find that there are criminals), the 
legal norms do not adapt accordingly (criminals must still be punished, no matter how 
many criminals there are). Many expectancy norms concerning translations could be of 
this counterfactual kind. For example, no matter how often we find that translations are 
domesticating (or foreignizing, or explanatory, or full of shifts, etc.), users of 
translations might still insist that they should not be. If some norms are working like 
this, then the bottom-up counting of facts and frequencies will never connect with the 
social pronouncements of what is acceptable or unacceptable. This is one very basic 

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reason why a descriptive approach to norms requires theoretical concepts. And that is 
another reason why, in turn, the descriptive paradigm is full of theories.
Whenever theorists tell us about norms, we should ask exactly how they have 
discovered those norms. If bottom-up, the empirical patterns may not all have equal 
status as psychological or social facts. And if top-down, then we should ask where the 
theorist found the categories of analysis, and why.
5.4.4 “Assumed” translations 
Here is another theoretical problem that cuts to the heart of empirical methodologies. If 
we set out to discover the historical and cultural diversity of translation norms, can we 
pretend to be sure from the outset what is meant by the term “translation”? If so, exactly 
what criteria should we use for collecting a set of things called “translations”? And if 
not, how can we possibly avoid imposing our own translation norms on other cultures 
and periods? This is one of the classical theoretical aporias that tend to worry 
researchers in dominant Western cultures.
Toury’s solution to the problem has been to leave the defining to the people we 
study. For him, “a ‘translation’ will be taken to be any target-language utterance which 
is presented or regarded as such [i.e. as a ‘translation’], on whatever grounds” (Toury 
1995a: 20). In other words, we wait to see what each culture and each period has to say 
about what is or is not a translation. The solution is the operative concept of “assumed 
translations,” which simply means that