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