Gideon Toury
Tel Aviv University (Israel)
Culture Planning and Translation*
The present paper is programmatic in nature. It represents an initial attempt
to approach translation both as a paradigmatic case of plan-able activity as
well as an agent of planning applied in other cultural domains. Case-studies
based on this mode of reasoning will be supplied later. Different, often
partial formulations of the present line of argumentation were presented at
several meetings over the last few years; e.g. in Tel Aviv, Amsterdam,
Istanbul and Manchester. I wish to thank all those who
attended those (and other) presentations for both encouragement and
criticism. Some may be glad to find responses to their critical comments
already incorporated in the text.
1
There was a time, back in the 1970s, when considerable
energy, a substantial part of it scholarly, was invested in issues of language
planning. For two decades or so, personalities such as Einar
Haugen and Joshua A. Fishman made language planning a dynamic field of study,
especially among sociolinguists, and many conferences and collections of
articles were devoted to it during those years, often under titles
emphasizing `advances' (e.g. Fishman 1974) or `progress' (e.g. Cobarrubias and Fishman 1983). A number of book-length
monographs then followed, most notably Cooper 1989.
The scope of language planning as a field of scholarly occupation
was meant to be rather broad. It was intended to apply to a lot more than
language itself as a coding system, which represented the more traditional
way of looking at planning. The expressed wish was now to tackle issues of
intervention in current states of cultural-linguistic affairs in various
different dimensions along with their interconnections, whose existence was
taken for granted but whose nature remained in need of study, both
descriptive and theoretical. Those dimensions included:
* status planning (or so-called language
policy),
* corpus planning (or codification,
on all possible levels; be it the coining of new terms, changes of spelling,
modifications of morphology and syntax, the adoption of a new script, or
whatever), and, finally,
* planning for planning's sake,
including the enhancement of the intended status of the language in question
(by way of implementing the policy agreed upon) and the dissemination of its
codified varieties, first and foremost in the educational system. (See e.g. Karam 1974: 112ff.; Cooper 1989: Chapters 5-7)
Unfortunately - as was so often the case with fields of scholarly interest
associated with language - attention was soon diverted mainly to codification
again, which indeed lends itself to systematization, even formalization, with
relative ease. The more ambitious program thus eroded, and to the extent that
status planning and planning-for-the-sake-of-planning had not been abandoned
altogether, they were certainly relegated to the periphery of scholarship, or
else given excessive autonomy which divorced the two dimensions from corpus
planning and blurred the foreseen interconnections. Total fragmentation was
the inevitable result: Something which could easily have developed into a lot
more than just language planning thus dwindled into considerably less than
even that.
This dwindling was furthered by directing the searchlight to the immediate
concerns of individual instances of language engineering rather than the
mechanics of planning itself, or sometimes by raising objections to the very
legitimacy of intervening in an allegedly `natural' course of events (which
is of course never natural). Whether in favor of planning or against it, the
discussions now led were more and more ideological: The wish to understand
cultural processes and the mechanisms underlying them was almost totally
replaced by an attempt to influence such processes and change their
course; namely, in a particular, more often than not `politically correct'
direction.
The last decade has been marked by the foregrounding of cultural concerns
in all the sciences of man, including the ones interested in language and
language behavior. This development has already brought along substantial
changes in the way phenomena `in the world of our experience' are approached,
which students of translation were among the first to applaud - and adopt.
There were even colleagues who nicknamed the 1980s the era of `cultural turn'
in Translation Studies (e.g. Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), even though it is not always all that
clear what this term was meant to cover.
Planning has always been a major force in culture and its dynamics.
Therefore it is my contention that we will soon be witnessing renewed
scholarly interest in the conditions underlying it, its mechanisms and the
results of their activation. Judging from current trends in other fields,
this interest will encompass a wide range of activities where language is
involved, but in these too, it will no longer be limited to language as a
code alone: the old program is bound to come to life again, albeit in a
modified way. When this occurs, there is no way Translation Studies can
remain out of bounds; and thinking in terms of planning is bound to affect
the very way translating and translation(s) will be tackled and the kind of
descriptions and explanations that will come to the fore. On the other hand,
culturally-oriented conceptions of translation would not fail to serve as an
example for the entire move. After all, it cannot be contested that
translation is as much a means of effecting culture planning as it is a
paradigmatic case thereof.
Which is by no means the case now. Rather, in
today's discussions of culture and language planning, to the extent that they
are being held at all, translation is assigned very little room, if any at
all. One need only go over periodicals such as Language Problems and
Language Planning to become aware of the almost total non-existence of
translation as a topic, or over leading periodicals in the field of
Translation Studies to see that the socio-cultural notion of planning (in
contradistinction to cognitive planning which is said to go on in one's
`black box' as one is engaging in translation) is hardly ever present.
However, in the heyday of language planning too, back in the 1970s,
translation could easily have been given a lot more prominence. This would
have occurred too, one should assume, had status planning, and especially
planning for planning’s sake, been given as
much attention as was codification. Because it is these two domains where
translation as a culturally-relevant occupation has often played its greatest
role: serving to try out the potentials of the planned system in an efficient
way as well as present members of the social group which entertains the culture
in question with appealing results.
True, when it came to particular cases, accounts could hardly do without
mentioning recourse to translation, at least as a means of building a textual
inventory. The role actually played by individual translations, or the
translations of particular texts of external origin, in the evolution of a
so-called target culture was also mentioned occasionally, especially in
historical studies. Recommendations for future planners too, especially in
individual communities and with respect to individual languages, often
alluded to the use of translation. It was advocated, for instance, as a means
of rationalizing the cost-benefit ratio (a topic dealt with in Thurburn 1971), that is, achieving quick, and relatively
good results while investing a bare minimum of resources such as time and
effort, even plain money, as well as building on imported prestige. Thus,
even John Wilkins, who invented a purely artificial Philosophical Language
back in 1668, chose translation when it came to trying out his language and
demonstrating its capacity to the readers of his mammoth treatise. How else
could they have been made aware of the potentials of a language which had
never been in any use? No less symptomatic is the fact that the text Wilkins cites
in translation into the invented language and discusses at some length
(Chapter IV) is a translation of the prestPater
Noster.
Anyhow, this is precisely where translation was normally left off: a mere
mention, a recommendation `to consider the possibility' - or, at most, a
demonstration of potentials, with or without a discussion. As far as I know,
translation has never been regarded in any explicit way as a cultural (and
textual-linguistic) phenomenon which is not only involved in the planning of some
other domain such as literature, journalism, even language in general, but
may also involve planning activities in and for itself; starting with the
distinction between more and less appropriate source languages, text-types
and individual texts and going all the way through to the establishment of
individual target-language replacements, whether they are taken from among
the existing options or created anew, and the establishment of that which
would be regarded as the appropriate relationships between such a replacement
and its counterpart in the corresponding source text (and see the
methodological notion of the coupled pair of replacing + replaced segments in
Toury 1995: esp. Chapter 4).
This is precisely what I have set out to do today; namely, to work out a
first approximation for an area of intersection between the interests of
Translation Studies, on the one hand, and Planning Studies, on the other. In
doing so, I will start from both ends alternately and draw imaginary lines
from each one of them towards the other until the two finally cross. One
point should be clear from the outset: my interest and approach will remain
scholarly throughout. Thus, inasmuch as I'll be doing some planning myself,
and not just talking about it, planning will only apply to the theoretical
and methodological levels of the discipline of Translation Studies. Thus, it
will only be offered to the virtual community of translation scholars, which
is my targeted group. Beyond that, I won't even be advocating culture
planning. I won't be propagating against it either: translation scholars
belong to many different home-cultures, and it is up to each culture to make
its own decisions and have its own struggles for and against planning outside
of our virtual community.
I will start with a few preliminaries of planning as a factor in the
shaping, reshaping and maintenance of collective entities in general, with
the intention of getting to translation soon enough. At which point, point of
view and direction of progress will both be reversed. My preliminary remarks
will draw heavily on Even-Zohar's recent work (see
references), which I find to be most pertinent to my own mode of thinking.
2
My starting point will be a comprehensive conception of
culture as a structured repertoire of options which (a) organizes
social interaction and (b) lends each move within a social group whatever
significance it is regarded to have.
The use of the word `options', in this context, is not accidental. Rather,
it implies that, in any given situation, choices have to be made. Nor are
these choices ever totally free. Rather, they are constrained in various ways
and to various extents. Membership in a collective entity and participation
in its culture thus involve not only the acquisition of the repertoire as
such, but also knowledge of the appropriateness/inappropriateness of whatever
options are included in it under different circumstances, the possibility of
maneuvering between alternatives included.
If this is what culture and cultural behavior are taken to be, then
planning would consist in any act of (more or less deliberate) intervention
in a current state of affairs within a social group; whether the impetus
for intervening originates in the group itself or outside of it.
In young, newly established cultures, planning may be equated with
transforming inventories of alternative modes of behavior into structured
systems (i.e. repertoires), or even first establishing the list of options
itself and then introducing some order into it. In institutionalized
cultures, where repertoires already exist (otherwise there would be no reason
to regard them as `institutionalized' in the first place), culture planning
would basically amount to an attempt to introduce new options which weren't
there before, and/or get rid of old ones, and by so doing effecting changes
in an extant set. It would also include ways of making the interfered-with
repertoire accessible to the culture and its individual members so that it
can be put to actual use. Intervention may also involve attempts to prevent
changes which others may be trying to introduce, thus struggling to maintain
an existing status quo. However, if indeed maintained, the
prevailing state of affairs will have acquired a different status due to the
very struggle which took place prior to its attainment and which has become a
fact of the culture itself and its history; change again, albeit of a
different kind.
Every individual in a collective entity is of course a user (or consumer)
of the repertoire; consumer for the sake of active behavior within the group,
to be sure, as well as the assessment of other members' behavior. Even if his
or her behavior seems unique (and every instance of behavior does have a
certain uniqueness to it), on the repertoremic
level - that is, with respect to the repertoire out of which all selections
will have been made - it would be a realization of the existing options,
which therefore more or less perpetuates the repertoire and the culture
defined by it; a strong element of stability, to be sure! However, in all
groups there are also a few members who act as producers on the level of the
repertoire itself. Whether entrusted by the group with the task of doing so
or whether self-appointed, these persons introduce new options and, by so
doing, act as agents of change. It is these few who may be said to engage in
planning activities; namely, in direct proportion to features such as
consciousness and deliberateness, on the one hand, and success, on the other.
If it wishes to have any chance of success, planning is always in need of
a power base. In fact, very often it is performed for the very sake of attaining
power and building a power base rather than as a bona fide attempt
to introduce a `desirable' change. The latter may well be a mere concomitant
factor, even just a means to a totally different end. Be that as it may,
planning is intimately connected with struggles for domination, as is every
attempt to prevent it, stop it, or change its course.
Historical studies into various cases of cultureand
language planning have revealed that disguise techniques often act as
important safeguards from losing such struggles, especially when power has
not yet been won: risk seems smaller when the claim is made that there is
actually very little new about what is being advocated, and especially when
this claim is backed up by evidence; always selective, if not distorted. (And
see, for instance, the way foreign words imported into Hebrew were disguised
as if they were home-bred; first as a practice of individual importers, then
as an official policy of the Academy of the Hebrew Language [Toury 1990]). By
contrast, when planning, and especially the dissemination of planned goods, have proved successful and some power has indeed been
achieved, further planning seems to become much smoother. It may also become
more direct, that is, freer of considerations other than the set goal itself
and the ways to attain it.
Planning needn't be done in one sweeping move either, applied to all
issues and cultural sectors at once. It can very well be realized in
smaller-scale activities, performed in particular sectors of the culture
and/or with respect to more or less defined issues. This is the reason why,
for instance, the language used in translations can be a lot more, or a lot
less controlled than the language used in non-translations without there
arising any real problem of inappropriateness: while, on occasion,
`acceptability as a translation' may well be similar to `acceptability' in
general, the two are not always, and hence not necessarily, the same (see
e.g. Toury 1995: 207-208; 1998: Section 4.9).
The fullest move imaginawould of course involve
the invention of a culture, or a cultural sector such as a language, a
literature, a literary genre, etc.; starting from scratch, as it were. While
theoretically possible, this option is normally interesting as a mental
exercise only. Thus, even so-called `invented languages' - and it seems
indeed easier to design a language than any other cultural coding system -
are not really absolute innovations. More significantly, those invented
languages that manage to attain a measure of success are bound to have relied
heavily on existing repertoires (albeit existing elsewhere, of course,
otherwise there would be little point in presenting the language as
`invented'). One need only compare John Wilkins's Philosophical Language,
mentioned above, with a language such as Esperanto to become convinced of the
advantages of blending new and old (and/or disguising new as old!) for the
sake of achieving success in planning activities, including the establishment
of a group that would adopt the resulting system as its own language.
Nor need planning be fully linear; first setting goals, then
devising methods for reaching them, and finally applying those methods in
actual behavior. In fact, to the extent that planners wish to achieve more
than momentary success, and stay in power, their activity will probably be
spiral, involving constant assessments and reassessments; not only of the
implementation but of the very methods and even the goals themselves. Thus,
success in culture planning is often a result of certain flexibility with
respect to one's positions, whereas rigidity may well lead to failure.
Finally, it is not at all necessary for every step in planning to be made
in full consciousness, let alone leave visible traces in the form of records.
Of course, the existence of written documents, especially if they reflect
decisions that were actually made in a (more or less) official setup, renders
the application of the term `planning' less controversial: the intervention
itself would simply have been made transparent that way. However, even in
fields such as architecture, or bridge building - conscious planning
activities of the highest intricacy - not every aspect is planned, let alone
documented, in this strong sense (which is something we tend to disregard as
long as it hasn't backfired). I am therefore all in favor of some lenience in
the application of the notion of `planning', at least in Cultural Studies: I
believe it is usable - and useful - as long as it is useful in helping us tounderstand (and hence to explain) cultural processes
and their products.
Once any intervention with a cultural repertoire is regarded as a
possible act of planning, translation emerges as a candidate par
excellence for (re)viewing in these terms. Most important of all,
translation activities and their products not only can, but very often do
cause changes in current states of affairs, often beyond the mere accumulation
of individual texts (which is at best marginal, in terms of cultural change)
and up to the level of repertoires itself. Many of the changes brought about
by means of translation are clearly not involuntary either. As is well known,
the act of translation is purposeful in its very nature, a teleological
activity where `success' (or `failure') are key notions; `success' and
`failure' in terms of the requirements of the recipient culture, that
is, which is precisely where planning activities may be said to have actually
taken place.
Like all truly socio-cultural activities, translation is norm-governed by
its very nature: it is subject to directives which draw from cultural
agreements and conventions (see now Toury 1998). From the very decision to
translate, which is never self-explanatory, through the choice of text-types
and individual texts, to the adoption (or invention) of models and linguistic
options on the receptor side. Translation also lends itself to manipulation,
and quite easily so, which is a sure sign of the ease with which
people-in-the-culture can be made aware of the conventions and norms
pertinent to that activity, or its products, at least.
Thus, for instance, it is not at all surprising that, when the Frisians in
the Netherlands decided to invest some effort in promoting their `language of
limited diffusion' and build up an inventory of texts in the Frisian
language, to serve as an important constituent of a coveted Frisian culture,
they decided to turn to translation. Even less surprising is the texts they
decided to use to begin their organized translational activities; namely, the
Bible, on the one hand, and certain modern classics of children's literature
on the other. Their focus was thus very much on the status of the
texts (which they were trying to import) as well as on marketing, or
at least marketability; certainly no less than it was on the codification
of the language itself as used in the texts, including norms of text-formation.
Nor was that pattern unique (and see Judith Woodsworth's
1996 account of the translation of A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner
into Romansch, a minority language of Switzerland.)
This marks the promised change of focus and reversal of direction in our
observations. I will make a fresh start now at the translational end and try
to work my way up to the notion of planning again.
3
As is well known, cultures resort to translating as one
possible way - and a highly controllable one, at that - of filling in gaps in
themselves. On whatever level.
A void in a cultural sector may of course be more or less noticeable to
the people-in-the-culture, nor is the only way of filling a void which has
been noticed to turn to translation: a gap can also be filled with an untranslated (that is, alien) entity, especially in a
society whose members share several languages. A non-translational entity can
also be produced; namely, within the possibilities of the recipient culture
itself, and, finally, the gap can be left open, at least for the time being.
To be sure, the very realization of the existence of a gap in one's own
culture is often triggered by the presence of an extant option elsewhere,
which may or may not be selected as a fill-in later on: one sees something in
another culture and wishes one had somethingsimilar
in one's own.
Be that as it may, any realized fill-in within a culture can be taken as
an indication that a void has once been felt. In retrospective observations
of translation, which are by far the most common ones, this is precisely what
we would normally start with: fill-ins which raise questions as to what gaps
they were designed to close, in what domains those gaps occurred and on what
grounds they presented themselves.
Observations of this kind allow us to regard acts of translation as
initiated by the receiving culture; the act itself, and especially
the shape it has taken, and hence the make-up of the end-product along with
the relations that link it to its counterpart in another culture and language
assumed to have served as its source; all important constituents of any
notion of [assumed] translation (Toury 1995: 31-35; 1995a). This
target-oriented assumption seems semiotically valid
even if sometimes - for instance, in so-called `colonial' situations - an
alleged gap may be factually pointed out for a recipient culture by a patron
of sorts - a planning agent by every standard! - who also purports to `know
better' how that gap may best be filled, and does all that from an
unquestionable position of power (and see Dollerup's
1997 attempt to distinguish between `translation as imposition' and
`translation as requisition'). Even under such circumstances, a more
persuasive approach would involve a kind of disguise again, even so much as
false pretense. Thus, it would often proceed not from the factual existence
of an option in another culture and try to simply impose it on the receiving
one. Rather, it would point out that there is something missing in the
prospective receiving culture, which should actually be there and which,
luckily enough, already exists elsewhere and can therefore be taken advantage
of.
As already mentioned, in the simplestof cases
(which are still all too often those translation scholars stick to), both
deficiency and fill-in seem to consist in mere textual entities. Being
an instance of performance, any text is of course unique; it may be more or
less in tune with prevailing norms and models, but in itself it is a novelty.
This holds for translated texts too. In fact, the novelty claim would still
hold for the nth translation of a text into a given language; be
it for the second or the hundredth time: it is the resulting entity
which is crucial here, the one which would actually be incorporated into the
target culture; and this entity will always have never been there
before. Unless, of course, one is willing to take Borges' speculations on
"Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" at face value and
apply them to the process of generating translated texts.
Now, wishing to introduce a text into a given culture by way of
translation, including the resolution to retranslate (rather than reprint an
existing translation, submit it to revision, or simply forget all about it),
always involves a series of (interconnected) decisions; and since it always
entails some change on behalf of the receiving culture, be it ever so slight,
those can be perceived as planning activities by their very nature.
The more so if and when possible implications of the introduction of the text
in question into the target culture are actually heeded, thus influencing
decision-making itself.
In more complex cases, not only individual texts may be introduced into a
culture, but hitherto non-existing models too; be they text-types, or
models for the representation of reality, or for linking episodes in a story,
even modes of language use (or sometimes imported legitimation
for the adoption of extant options which have remained [relatively] unused so
far). This is of course a much more radical, repertoremic
sense of placing new options at the disposal of a culture. Clearly, changes
of this magnitude would tend to involve groups of texts rather than single
instances of linguistic performance; either a number of texts which embody a
recurring pattern carried over from the source cultureor
(more often, it seems) texts which have undergone a similar act of transfer
within the receiving culture itself, and hence independently of the features
their counterparts--sources may have had in the contributing culture(s).
Of course, the likelihood of incurring changes in the receiving culture
beyond the mere presence of a hitherto unknown text is no production mishap.
Rather, it is in the very nature of translation as a mode of cultural
behavior, which planners have always been aware of. Thus, while translation
events are indeed initiated by the target culture and intended to cater for
its needs, they are often designed to deviate from patterns which have
become sanctioned within that culture. A certain portion of these deviations
- though not necessarily all of them - may be associated with the felt need
to retain invariant at least some features of the immediate source text, a
postulate which seems to have been an integral part of most notions of
(assumed) translation, notwithstanding the enormous variability of this
so-called `equivalence postulate'; in reality and theory alike (see now
Halverson 1997; in press).
Be the reasons for deviation from target-culture conventionalized patterns
as they may, the obvious result is that it is not unusual for translations to
be quite distinct from non- translational entities and even advertise
their foreignness, including the deviations (or novelties) themselves, which
may be associated with their foreign origin. In various cultures, tolerance
of anomalies (even though not necessarily all anomalies, on all levels at
once) has been known to have been much greater in acts and products marked
`translational' than in non-translational behavior. Which
lends initial justification to the introduction of novelties by means of
translation acts and their results. In fact, very often, an amount of
deviance from target-normality in texts assumed to have been translated is
considered not only acceptable, or even justifiable, but actually preferable
to complete conformity to models pertaining to the domestic repertoire: Too
smooth a translation is sometimes regarded with suspicion, evidently assuming
that smoothness must have been achieved at a price. Such a price is often
regarded by people-in-the-culture as too high, even if its exact nature
remains concealed from most of them.
The fact that deviations from sanctioned patterns occur and may be noted
by the people-in-the-culture, who may even like it that way, breeds an
inherent possibility of manipulating these reactions; for instance, by
producing the `required' deviations more or less at will. This would bring
translational activities even closer to the notion of planning.
A striking reflection of the possibility of manipulating translation and
translational deviations from target- culture conventions is the phenomenon
of fictitious translations; original texts which utilize features that
people- in-the-culture have come to associate with translations (see Toury
1995: Excursus A). These texts are then presented to the culture - and often
accepted by its members - as products of genuine, text- induced acts of
translation: another disguise, another mode of false pretense. Interestingly
enough, work on dozens of cases, originating in various cultures and periods
of time, from the Middle Ages until today, has revealed that there is hardly
a single case where the decision to pseudo-translate, and the way this
decision was implemented, could not be accounted for in terms of a more or
less deliberate attempt to introduce new options into a culture while
neutralizing many of the objections that might have arisen, had the novelties
been offered in a straightforward, non-disguised manner. Is there a better
demonstration of planning? And is this kind of planning not intimately
connected with the very nature of translation, its own initial `plan-ability'
and the ease with which it lends itself to manipulation?!
In many cases, attempts to disguise novelties, whether home-bred or
borrowed or mixtures of the two, astranslational
importations have proved highly successful too: the novelties introduced
through fictitious translations were indeed added to the receiving culture as
options, with the result that the entire structure of its repertoire
underwent change; often in a foreseen, if not planned direction. It is not
rare to find cases where the new options actually reached the cultural
epicenter itself; either immediately, or (more often) following a period of
struggle for acceptance, which may have involved additional adjustment to the
receptor culture too. Suffice it to mention the role of the novella Papa
Hamlet in the creation of a uniquely German brand of literary naturalism
at the end of the 19th century known as the konsequenter
Naturalismus, the role of The Book of
Mormon in the establishment of a new religious sect in the US a few
decades earlier, or the role of some 300 paperbacks featuring a guy named
Patrick Kim, a CIA agent of Korean descent, in the establishment - as well as
legitimization - of a subgenre of "spy books" in Israel of the
1960s and 1970s.
4
What teachers of translation in professional or
academic institutes are doing can also be re-interpreted as a case of
planning, and quite easily so. After all, teaching - which is planned by its
very nature - is also a planning activity par excellence.
One would think that persons, who have, after all, been entrusted by
society itself with the training of translators rather than letting them
hatch slowly under `free' societal circumstances, would see their task as
imparting modes of behavior to the non-experienced the way they are normally
practiced in the culture, thus preparing them for acceptance into the group
of practicing translators. Of course, even if this were the case, it would still
have counted as an instance of planning. However, very often this is not what
happens at all. What students of translation are actually being offered
normally draws on anadmixture of concepts borrowed
from sources deemed (by curriculum designers and teachers) more `respectable'
than the behavior of flesh-and-blood translators under real socio-cultural
conditions; mainly scholarly disciplines such as linguistics,
text-linguistics, communication studies or pragmatics. These concepts are
supplemented by intuitions, sometimes very good ones, but all too often
seasoned with a speck of wishful thinking. In the most extreme cases, the
claim is even made (at least implicitly) that there are things that simply should,
or should never, be done; by virtue of what translation allegedly
`is', that is, and not by virtue of a changeable and changing convention; in
fact, very often in sharp contrast to socially- relevant conventions.
Of course, there is an ideology underlying this attitude, as there is
underlying most acts of planning; and ideologies tend to breed their own
norms. Thus, many teachers of translation see their task precisely as
intervening in an existing state of affairs and effecting changes within it.
Most of them would of course claim that this state of affairs is `bad', and
in sore need of `improvement', but it would still be change that they
would be after; and in a situation which others may well find perfectly
satisfactory, or wish to see change in a different direction.
Teachers do what they do from a position of almost absolute power
vis-à-vis their students, power granted to them by the institutions they work
in, and - at least by extension - by higher authorities still; sometimes,
though by no means always, and certainly not necessarily, on the strength of
their having been recognized by society in their own capacity as practicing
translators. However, the position of a teacher within a training institute
does not necessarily imply similar power vis-à-vis society at large, even
though this is precisely what the teachers maybe said to be struggling for.
To use slightly different terms: training institutes often act as closed
societal groups, having their own conventions and norms of how to behave
`properly', in accordance with those conventions. These norms they are trying
to impose on all newcomers to the group (namely, the students), and through
them - on society and culture as a whole. Is there a more obvious case of
`culture engineering'? Which is however not always all that successful:
Transition from the closed group of the institute into the world is not
always smooth and unpainful. Thus, it is often the
case that the unfortunate graduates have to undergo a process of forgetting a
great deal of what they were taught, and adjust, at least in part, to
prevalent norms of socio-cultural appropriateness; ironically enough, often
the very same norms their trainers wished to see changed... Much the same as
journalists and writers are often made to suspend a substantial part of the
grammar they learnt at school as they are playing these particular roles.
By the same token, many proponents of contemporary ideologies of
translation also indulge in culture planning; at least to the same extent
that they do theoretical thinking and a lot more than they are interested in
accounting for rather than merely criticizing what `real' translators have
been known to do in `real-life' situations. In actual fact, what many of them
are mainly after is the formulation of guidelines, even so much as
instructions for appropriate - e.g. politically correct in whatever terms -
behavior, which should be different from the kind of translational behavior
which was regarded normative up till now; a noble cultural goal which may
even be achieved, but not really a scholarly one.
5
What I have been saying about translation in Sections 3
and 4 of the present paper was taken almost verbatim from my Descriptive
Translation Studies and beyond (Toury 1995). The only thing of essence I
added were a number of explicit interpolations about planning, and those were
more in the line of clarifications than additions, let alone real changes in
the original line of argumentation. Which means that recognizing the
relevance of the notion of planning to the study of translation, as well as
recognizing the relevance of the study of translation to our understanding of
what culture planning may involve, has come about rather late. It evolved in
small, gradual paces too.
Most of the points made in the book were made in a series of articles
published in the 1980s. Thus, everything was formulated as part of a
translational discussion proper, with no initial intention of invoking the
notion of planning. In fact, the word `planning' itself was hardly used in
them; not even in the 1995 book, for which much of the older stuff was
rewritten. I know for sure, because I counted! The argumentation simply
evolved towards this notion; namely, from the material itself.
Was it really a totally unplanned move, as it seems to have been?
On second thought, it may be claimed that movement towards viewing
translation in terms of planning started in the mid-1970s, with the first
large-scale application of the notion of norm to the study of translational
behavior (Toury 1977, 1978). As I see it now, it shouldn't be too difficult
to work out correlations between the two systems of notions, those connected
with planning, on the one hand, and those connected with translation as a
norm-governed activity, on the other; however, this task, which may be of
interest for the history of our discipline, goes way beyond what I set out to
do in this programmatic essay.
Note
* A somewhat shorter version of this article was read at the International
Conference "anovadores de nós
- anosadores de vós",
Vigo, 1997.
References
Bassnett, S. and A. Lefevere. 1990. "Introduction: Proust's Grandmother
and the Thousand and One Nights. The `Cultural Turn' in Translation
Studies", in S. Bassnett
and A. Lefevere, eds. Translation, History and
Culture. London-New York: Pinter, 1990. 1-13.
Borges, J. L. 1970. "Pierre Menard, Author
of the Quixote", in Labyrinths. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970. 62-71.
Cobarrubias, J. and
J.A. Fishman, eds. 1983. Progress in Languages Planning: International
Perspectives. Berlin etc.: Mouton.
Cooper, R.L. 1989. Language Planning and
Social Change. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University
Press.
Dollerup, C. 1997.
"Translation as Imposition vs. Translation as Requisition", in M.
Snell-Hornby, Z. Jettmarová
and K. Kaindl, eds.Translation
as Intercultural Communication: Selected Papers from the EST Congress - Prague 1995.
Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997.
45-56.
Even-Zohar, I. 1994. "Culture Planning and the Market",
in "http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/papers/plan_clt.html".
Even-Zohar, I. 1997. "Factors and Dependencies in Culture: A
Revised Draft for Polysystem Culture
Research", in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature XXIV:1. 15-34.
Even-Zohar, I. 1997a. "Repertoire and the Wealth of
Entities", in
"http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/papers/rep-wea2.html".
Even-Zohar, I. 1997b. "Culture Planning and Cultural
Resistance", in
"http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/papers/plan_res.htm".
Even-Zohar, I. 1997c. "The Making of Culture Repertoire and
the Role of Transfer", in Target 9:2. 373-381.
Fishman, J.A., ed. 1974. Advances in
Language Planning. The Hague-Paris: Mouton.
Halverson, S. 1997. "The Concept of
Equivalence in Translation Studies: Much Ado About Something", in Target
9:2. 207-233.
Halverson, S. in press. "Conceptual Work
and the `Translation' Concept", in Target 11:1.
Karam, F.X. 1974.
"Toward a Definition of Language Planning", in Fishman 1974:
103-124.
Thorburn, Th. 1971.
"Cost-Benefit Analysis in Language Planning", in J. Rubin and B.H. Jernudd, eds. Can Language Bw
Planned? The University Press of Hawaii,
1971. 253-262.
Toury, G. 1977. Translational Norms and
Literary Translation into Hebrew, 1930-1945. Tel Aviv: The Porter
Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. [in Hebrew]
Toury, G. 1978 [11976]. "The
Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation", in J.S Holmes, J.
Lambert and R. van den Broeck, eds. Literature
and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies. Leuven:
acco, 1978. 83-100.
Toury, G. 1990. "From One Signifier to
Another: Modified Phonetic Transposition in Word-Formation and
Translation", in R. Arntz and G. Thome, eds. Übersetzungswissensch: Ergebnisse und Perspektiven. Festschrift für
Wolfram Wilss zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Gunter Narr,
1990. 191-198.
Toury, G. 1995. Descriptive Translation
Studies and beyond. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Toury, G. 1995a. "The Notion of `Assumed
Translation': An Invitation to a New Discussion", in H. Bloemen, E. Hertog and W. Segers, eds. Letterlijkheid Woordelijkheid/Literality
Verbality. Antwerpen/Harmelen:
Fantom, 1995. 135-147.
Toury, G. 1998. "A Handful of Paragraphs
on `Translation' and `Norms'", in Current Issues in Language and
Society 5:1&2 (1999). 9-31.
Wilkins, J. 1668. An Essay Towards a Real
Character and a Philosophical Language. London.
Woodsworth, J. 1996.
"Language, Translation and the Promotion of National Identity: Two Test
Cases", in Target 8:2. 211-238.
|