Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Locating systems and individuals in translation studies 125of routine patterns in translators’ behaviour. But she argues her case in a very convincingway: the ability of Corpus Translation Studies to identify what is “central”and “typical” in translators’ behaviour has the “side-effect” of highlighting caseswhich go beyond routine patterns. When she describes Corpus Linguistics shewrites: “creative uses of language are brought into greater relief when one seesthem against a backdrop of what is typical for a language” (ibid.: 32). This can beapplied to translation too: creative uses of translation are brought into greater reliefwhen one sees them against a backdrop of what is typical in translation; suchcreativities need to be projected against the rules.It seems to me that this has a strong bearing on the discipline of translationstudies as a whole, among other disciplines. Maria Tymoczko is one of thosescholars whose research interests lie outside the field of Corpus Translation Studies,and yet she makes the most of the insights that can be inferred from thismodel (1998). She points out that most approaches to translation are based oncomparative methods, but these are usually applied in a rather “limited” way: infact, not only Tymoczko herself, but a large number of scholars have noticed andcriticised a tendency to focus on relations of likeness, rather than difference, intranslation research (see Johnston 1992; Venuti 1995, 1998; Cronin 2000; Kenny2001). This means that scholars end up by constructing frameworks of analysiswhich privilege sameness and similarity, to the detriment of what lies outsideit – all the discrepant or “indeterminate” cases.According to Tymoczko, corpus-based approaches to translation are morelikely than other models to avoid that tendency, and “remain open to difference,differentiation, and particularity” (Tymoczko 1998: 4), because they focus on the“infinite variety” of language use. Such a variety is a guarantee for the inclusionof difference: the odd cases will be represented side by side with what is more“regular” and “normal”, and instead of being neglected as a result of their lack ofconformity, they would stand out more clearly.As a result, it seems high time translation studies employ research modelscommitted to register both stability and change, both norm and norm-breaking.If translation researchers keep on focusing only on rules which are to the detrimentof strategies – that is the different, idiosyncratic ways in which rules are materiallyapplied – they are often going to miss the specificity of translation activities,together with all those irregular, contradictory features of translation whichare hardly subject to regulation.Thus the relationship between patterned translation behaviour and thetranslator’s distinct choices, that is the social and individual aspects of translation,could be of special interest for researchers in the field: instead of consideringthem as two opposing poles, their mutual dependence and modes of interactioncould be productively investigated. In order to do this, both quantitative (descrip-