Descriptive translation studies

Abstract

The descriptive tendency in translation studies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s among scholars and students of comparative literature as a reaction against the prescriptively oriented and linguistically inspired approaches to translation that were prevalent at the time. The Czech scholar Jiri Levy had compared translating to decision-making in formal games, and sought to understand individual translations as reflecting different national or historical poetics and conventions. The Slovak Anton Popovic saw translation as negotiating different sets of conventions in the donor and receptor cultures, leading to inevitable shifts in meaning. A great deal of historical research into translation, for instance, is descriptive and explanatory in nature without explicitly affiliating itself with descriptive translation studies. Descriptive studies fared better elsewhere. Investigating multiple translations and the historical conditioning of the production and reception of translation, researchers noticed regularities and patterns in the work of individual translators and within genres, periods and groups of translators.

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