Beyond Toury's Concept of Norms: the Haskalah Case

Taking a panoramic look to Gideon Toury’s work, regardless the moments in time when he developed various approaches to translation, we can see why he refered to translation as being a decision making progress, or to the translator as playing a social role. As we all know, he presumably bears in mind the concept of norms seen as socio-cultural constraints, which govern a given society at a given time and to which most of the times the translator has to conform in order to receive the acceptance of the target audience. By taking these into account together with using cognitive tools, like cultural repertoires seen as pre-organized set of options, and acts of planning regarded as interventions in a current state of affairs, we can have a picture of what decisions a translator would make and how these would influence the receiving culture. The picture would be incomplete however, for, as Theo Hermans states, translation does not occur in a vacuum, and even if Toury brings in question the social context, he fails to acknowledge the intricacies between various entities involved in the translation process:

Translation needs to be seen in conjuction with other fields of discourse, and with questions of power

. (Hermans, p.89)

Hermans also believes that the terms 'adequate' and 'acceptable' are confusing, especially because no one had established yet a yardstick which could measure what would acceptable be and what not. The binary opposition itself is problematic, for the translation proccess cannot be narrowed down to one of these poles nor can ignore the multiple factors which exist outside these concepts. One more observation he makes is that Toury ignores to see norms as ‘templates in offering ready-made solutions to particular types of problem’(p.79).

Going back to Toury’s use of planning in translation, it seems that the term implies a certain interconnection with power, in means that certain agents may use translation by making certain choices and deliberate changes in order to influence certain behaviours in a certain way. He gives as example the Jewish Enlightenment movement, known as Haskalah. A group of self-appointed agents decided to modernize ‘the mid-European’ style by using translation, among others, as a way to gradually accomodate the Jewish society with some new literary genre.

I could argue that in this example we may find some contra-arguments to Hermans objections. First, I believe that the question of power is ackowledged from the planning perspective, as I mentioned before. The initiators of Haskalah used tactics to implement innovative elements in the closed, archaic system, and they must have been authoritative, prestigious figures, ‘patrons’ to which the society would have related with respect. So that should respond to a certain extent to Herman’s objection that norms fail to account linguistic, social, politic and ideological aspects of a culture at once by merely resuming to a linear relation between the source text and the target culture, with only the translator as a mediator. This would be valid of course if we put the notions of norms, planning and repertoire together.

Secondly, even though Toury doesn’t mention it in the paper, it is known that Haskalah had repercussions on other levels as well, not only literary. Now the concept of norms as Toury set them out may seem in this case irrelevant, but perhaps we can establish a correlation between repertoire as a sum of ways in which people use a set of pre-organized options (models) and norms as, in Herman’s view, ready-made templates which people use in particular problems. If that is the case, we can look further on the Haskalah movement and argue that the options made by the social agents to use translation (sometimes maybe even pseudo-translation) for modernizing the literary system may be seen as a way to use ready-made norms. We can give an example the disguise mechanism like using fables, a literary genre considered safe in the target culture.

Returning to the argument that Haskalah had repercussions beyond the literary context, we are forced to observe this phenomenon outside the boundaries of norms. We know for a fact that this movement had an ideological substrate, in which the initiators aimed at the possibility of integration and acceptance of Jews among non-Jews. So we can see that it interferes with other domains of culture as well, as Herman wanted to pinpoint. However, I find it unrealistic to judge a cultural phenomenon from a single perspective, as in this case that of norms, and it is perhaps better to relate to various concepts from translation studies to make an assessment as realistic and objective as possible.

References:
'Translations as a Means of Planning and the Planning of Translation', Gideon Toury, from Translation and (re)shaping of culture, edited by Saliha Paker;

Translation in Systems, Theo Hermans;


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah