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
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