A research training seminar open to the general public, organized by the Intercultural Studies Group
Professor Theo Hermans, University College London
Professor José Lambert, Katolieke Universiteit Leuven
Professor Gideon Toury, University of Tel Aviv
Moderator: Anthony Pym, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Saturday 31 January 2004
Tarragona Museum of Modern Art, Carrer Santa Anna 8, Tarragona
10 - 14, 16.30 - 18.30
Fee: 45 euros (includes coffee break and lunch)
Questions
The seminar will be based on the following sets of questions. Professors Hermans, Lambert and Toury will be invited to give brief responses to each set of questions, and the floor will then be open for general discussion. We will then move on to the next set of questions. If we don't answer all the questions, we'll come back next year.
What are Descriptive Translation Studies?
· Where has the term come from, and where is it headed?
· What has the discipline discovered in the past 15 or so years?
· Has the discipline been institutionally successful? If so, why?
· Does DTS stand for Dead Translation Studies? (Yes, there is a pun on "wither".)
Manipulation or Norms?
· Is the concept of norms still central to the discipline?
· How do we discover norms?
· If the notion of "manipulation" emphasized translation as change, does the notion of "norms" emphasize continuity and conformity?
· Are we just growing old?
Empirical Procedures or Ethical Action?
· What is the position of the observer in DTS?
· Can we reintegrate prescriptive applications?
· Must we adhere to the positivist exclusion of ethics, or can we develop a (postmodern?) ethics of research?
· Has the establishing of an academic discipline incurred an intellectual price?
Laws or Universalized Interest?
· Have DTS really discovered any laws?
· Are such discoveries the adequate goal of the discipline?
· How much empirical testing is required before a hypothesis becomes a law?
· By what criteria might a law be non-trivial?
· What are the subjective interests behind the formulation of a law?
Systems or Identities?
· Is the notion of system tied to a concept of the nation state?
· Is the notion of system still valid within fragmented postmodern communication networks?
· Should DTS study translation within the frame of systems, polysystems, literatures, languages, societies, classes, social groups, cultures, locales, discourses, habitus, or something else?
· How might these frames concern questions of power and identity? In whose interests are translations carried out?
· What can we learn from sociology (Bourdieu, Luhmann)?
· Do we need to study more than translation?
· What applications might DTS offer in the fields of language planning, culture planning, language technologies, localization, or translator training (to name a few)?
New Technologies, New Research?
· What are the roles of new research technologies (TAPs, Translog, corpora)?
· What effects might these technologies have on the key concepts of DTS?
· Are there any interesting hypotheses that can now be tested thanks to these technologies?
New Forms of Translation, new Theories?
· Are the concepts of DTS affecting by the growing attention to community interpreting, distance interpreting, multimedia translation (film, DVD, video games), website localization, software localization, for example?
· How should DTS relate to the "metaphoricals" who study societies and identities as translations (e.g. "the postcolonial subject is constantly in translation")?
· Does it make any sense to fix limits to Translation Studies?
New Societies, New Translation Studies?
· How will translation be affected by the growth of information societies?
· What is the relation between translation and the development of English as a lingua franca?
· Why is Translation Studies so underdeveloped within the world's central hegemonic power?
· How is translation affected by the development of postmodern nations with restricted sovereignty (Robert Cooper)?
Storms in Teacups?
· Do not translations exert less power than non-translations?
· Are not translations more linguistically conservative than non-translations?
· Are not translators condemned to anonymous service functions, by the very nature of their discourse?
· Are not our global communications far more affected by the growth of English than by any number of translations?
