shifts of expression ” was also happening in roughly the same years as Catford (cf.
Popovi
č
1968, 1970; Miko 1970) but the focus was not at all the same. For many of the
Europeans, especially those coming from literary studies, shifts could be made quite
independently of any simple desire to maintain equivalence. They could thus be
approached in a top-down way, starting from major hypotheses about why they might
exist and how they could form tendencies.
Popovi č , for instance, claimed that there are “two stylistic norms in the
translator’s work: the norm of the original and the norm of the translation” (1968/70:
82). This seems so simple as to be obvious. Yet consider the consequence: as soon as
the two “
stylistic norms ” are announced, the multiplicity of shifts is already theorized
in terms of coherent patterns (“norms” is a term we will meet further below). This kind
of approach could connect quite easily with the study of literary stylistics, where one
might see the two interacting “norms” as the voices of author and translator. On another
level, shifts could be patterned differently because of historical factors (the nature of the
receiving system, patronage, new text purpose, different ideas about what translation is,
etc.). Or again, some shifts might come about simply as a result of the translation
process as such (these would later be dubbed potential “universals”). On all those levels,
the top-down approach to shifts seeks
causal factors (the reasons for the shifts) that are
quite different from those of the equivalence paradigm. These descriptive approaches
could obviously join forces with the bottom-up analyses carried out by linguists, but
their theoretical frame was fundamentally different. In effect, despite the misnomer
“descriptive,” these were theories about the possible causes (personal, institutional,
historical) explaining why people translate differently.
As an example of the top-down analysis of historically bound translation shifts,
consider the basic problem of what to do with a