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TargetTarget-text theory
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As opposed to source-text theory; It focuses not on some notion of equivalence as postulated requirements, but on the actual relationship constructed between the source text and its “factual replacement”. He introduces a new set of factors that may be more powerful that other factors. The eventual goal of Toury’s theory was to establish a hierarchy of interrelated factors that determine the translation product. In short, Toury demanded that translation theory include cultural-historical “facts”, a set of laws that he calls “translation norms”.
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Toury’s own theoretical framework
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“Original” texts contain clusters of properties, meanings, possibilities. All translation privilege certain properties/meanings at the expense of others, and the concept of a “correct” translation ceases to be a real possibility(Toury, 1980: 18) Translations themselves have no “fixed” identity; because they are always subject to different socio-literary contextual factors, they thus must be viewed as having multiple identities, dependent upon the forces that govern the decision process at a particular time.
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Toury : a brief summary of his life
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Gideon Toury is Professor of Poetics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Tel Aviv University, where he holds the M. Bernstein Chair of Translation Theory. He is the founder and General Editor of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies and for years General Editor of the important Benjamins Translation Library. He has published three books, a number of edited volumes and numerous articles, in both English and Hebrew, in the fields of translation theory and comparative literature. His articles have also appeared in translation in many other languages, and he is himself an active translator too (with about 30 books and many articles to his credit). He is a member of the editorial or advisory boards of a number of international journals. In 2000, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Middlesex University, London.
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targetGideon Toury: toward a targettext theory of translation
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Two Periods of his work
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1972-1976, base on polysystem theory framework, reported in Translation Norms and Literary Translation into Hebrew, a comprehensive sociological study of the cultural conditions affecting the translation of foreign language novels into Hebrew during the period 193045; 1975-1980, still based on polysystem framework, but he came up a hypothesis which distinguished him from his predecessors, collected in papers In Search of a Theory of Translation, an attempt to develop a more comprehensive theory of translation base on findings of his own field work;
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Field work of Gideon Toury
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Goal: Goal to discover the actual decisions made during the translation process, and eventually a system of rules governing the translation ; Findings: Findings linguistics and aesthetics played a very small role in the translation process; most texts were selected for ideological reasons; accidents also. Despite the lack of conformity with hypothetical models of translation equivalence, mistranslations are rare; complete equivalence is even rarer. Near-adequacy is often accidental. Reasons for lack of concern for “faithfulness”: the translators’ main goal of achieving acceptable translations in the target culture; cultural condition of the receiving system predominates.
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Significance of Toury’s idea and the changes it brings
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He pushes the concept of a theory of translation beyond the margins of a model restricted to faithfulness to the original, or of single, unified relationship between the source and target texts. Translation becomes a relative term, dependent upon the forces of history and the semiotic web called culture. The role of translation theory is altered. It ceases its search for a system from which to judge the product and now focuses on the development of a model to help explain the process that determines the final version.
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Toury’s own theoretical framework
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Opposes theories that are based upon a single unified and abstract identity or a proper interpretation of “equal” performance. Is based on difference and assumes structural differences between languages. Posits hypothetical poles of total acceptability in the target culture at the one extreme and total adequacy to the source text at the other. Translation is located in the middle. Translation equivalence is not a hypothetical ideal but an empirical matter. The translated text exists as a cultural artifact for the replacement of a source text by an acceptable version in the reO Criticism of the current theory context