On Toury's laws of how translators translate

Abstract

Gideon Toury has proposed two exemplary laws of the way translators produce translations: the law of increasing standardization, and the law of interference from the source text. Much subsequent investigation has tended not to be on the level of laws but is instead framed in terms of translation universals, particularly when involving the use of comparable corpora. However, when comparing Toury’s proposed laws with Baker’s compilation of four possible translation universals, we find that the latter elaborate only the first of the laws and do not regularly concern interference from the source text. This one-sidedness of the “universal” agenda enhances the justification of comparable corpora but poses serious problems for any kind of causal explanation of the findings. It would thus seem advisable to return to the duality of Toury’s exemplary propositions. At the same time, the probabilistic nature of Toury’s laws, which would become strong or weak depending on variable sociocultural conditions, means that they cannot properly be universal on the solely linguistic level, where they would in fact appear to contradict each other. In keeping with this, we propose that the tendency to standardize and the tendency to channel interference are both risk-averse strategies, and that their status as possible laws thus depends on the relative absence of rewards for translators who take risks. It follows that future possible laws might be found in the dynamics of risk management.

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