The Concept of Norm

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The Concept of Norm


The concept of norm, introduced by Gideon Toury in the 1970’s, is used to refer to “regularities of translation behaviour within a specific sociocultural situation” (Baker 1998: 163). Although the concept of norm has contributed invaluably to the field of translation studies, translation scholars, like Pym (1998a), have also criticized Toury’s approach for several reasons, one of which will be discussed in this response paper.



To start with two of the contributions of the approach, I would like to point out that Toury’s norms have widely been used as a theoretical framework by many researchers in the field of translation studies. I think that this achievement can be due to various reasons, such as its stress on target oriented corpus analysis and examination of norms in a social, cultural and historical context. Toury (1995) presents examples of case studies and in those examples like that of Schwartz’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Hebrew, there is a corpus. It is through observing all the sonnets in the corpus that some conclusions are drawn about the decisions made by Schwartz in the process of translation. Baker (1998) asserts that doing case studies on a corpus of target texts, rather than a single translated text, has provided “the basis for a relevant research programme” (165). While studying a corpus of translated texts in order to identify the norms conformed by the translator (as a result, he also finds out which norms have not been taken into consideration), Toury does not treat the texts in isolation. He, on the contrary, examines the condition under the light shed by Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory. By relying on historical information, he explains possible causes of the observed regularities or irregularities. For example, while describing the language of Schwartz’s translations, he states that the norms of the Enlightenment poetry have been influential on Schwartz’s decisions. This effect was because of the active state of those norms in Hebrew literature at the time. Thus, the established norms in the source texts written in Hebrew were influential on the norms in the translated literature. I believe that Toury’s norms provide us with the opportunity to analyze target texts in relation with one another and the target culture at a certain time and place, thus bringing a wide perspective.



Besides these positive remarks on Toury’s norms, there are also criticisms, one of which will be discussed here. Pym (1998a) criticizes Toury for several reasons, including Toury’s not mentioning people especially when he explains negotiation of norms and his effort to gather “chronicles of stability” (1998: 113). Pym asks “who negotiates norm?” (111) and puts forward the idea that in the absence of people, it is not very much possible to talk about a “social logic behind the emergence of norms” (108). Pym is, in a way, glad that there is at least the idea of ‘negotiation’ which signals the presence of people, but complains that we are not given any idea as to who these people are, where they are, or how they negotiate norms. When I read these objections of Pym’s, I thought about my previous readings. I remember that Pym (1998b) criticizes Holmes for not including translators in his map of the translation studies and that he prefers Humphrey’s map as Humphrey had two main branches one of which was for translators. Toury (1995), on the other hand, is not worried about the absence of a branch specifically for translators when he discusses the map at the beginning of the book. This absence or presence of focus on ‘people’ may be seen as a difference between Pym’s (1998a) and Toury’s (1995) perspectives. However, I would also like to add that Toury does not discuss norms in target texts without referring to translators who obviously constitute an important group of ‘people’ in the process of translation.



In conclusion, I believe that Toury’s notion of norms is useful in analyzing translations. Although there may be certain aspects that lack, studying translated texts through norms is significant also because we have the opportunity to be objective in our evaluations.



REFERENCES



Baker, Mona., ed. 1998. Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge.



Pym, Anthony. 1998a. “Okay, So How are Translation Norms Negotiated? A Question for Gideon Toury and Theo Hermans”. Current Issues in Language and Society. 5 (1&2). 107-113.



Pym, Anthony. 1998b. Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome.



Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.