Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

5.4.6 Target-side priority 
As we have noted, 
Toury
upset linguistics-based studies of translation not only by 
opposing prescriptivism, but more profoundly by insisting that translations should be 

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studied in terms of their 
target
contexts rather than in relation to their sources (see 
Toury 1995b: 136). This led to an extreme position: in Toury’s words, “translations 
should be regarded as facts of target cultures” (1995b: 139; cf. 1995a: 29). This 
proposition should be understood as part of a specific research methodology; it does not 
mean that translations somehow never have source texts (which would absurdly imply 
that all translations are actually pseudotranslations). Toury’s argument is that the factors 
needed to describe the specificity of how translations work can all be found within the 
target system. This is based on the assumption that translators “operate first and 
foremost in the interest of the culture into which they are translating” (1995a: 12), either 
in order to reinforce the norms of the target culture or to fill in perceived “gaps.” 
Those general methodological precepts have born fruits. When one studies, for 
example, a corpus of English theater translated into Spanish (Merino 1994) or censored 
translations in Franco’s Spain (Merino and Rabadán 2002), even when the material is 
organized in terms of English-Spanish pairs, the shifts make sense in terms of the norms 
of the Spanish host system, especially when it comes to the Franco regime’s systemic 
censorship and its various historical avatars (for notes on the wider project on 
translation and censorship, see Merino Álvaraz 2005; for research projects associated 
with the earlier development of the descriptive paradigm, see Lambert 1988, 1995). In 
these and similar case studies, translations are indeed approached as facts of target 
cultures, and much quantitative data has been produced in those terms. 
The principle of target-side priority has nevertheless been contested. The 
researchers working on literary translation at