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Target and Purpose

The descriptive turn moved the field’s centre from the source text to the target culture, and skopos theory moved it to the purpose of the act. Between them, they are where translation studies stopped legislating and started describing.

James Holmes’s paper “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” (1972) gave the discipline its name and its map, dividing it into pure and applied branches, and the pure branch into theoretical and descriptive. The descriptive programme was carried out at Tel Aviv. Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory (Papers in Historical Poetics, 1978; revised 1990) treated a literature as a system of systems in which translated literature occupies a position, central or peripheral, that shapes how translations are made: a young or crisis-ridden literature translates to import models and tolerates foreignness, an established one translates to fill gaps and domesticates. Gideon Toury, in In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980) and Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995), proposed that the field stop legislating what translations should be and describe what they are: a translation is whatever the target culture accepts as one, and translators follow norms, initial, preliminary and operational, that can be reconstructed from the texts. The move was consequential. It shifted the field’s centre from the source text to the target culture, and it turned equivalence from a criterion into an observation, whatever relation a given culture happens to count as translation.

Skopos theory, introduced by Hans Vermeer in 1978 and developed with Katharina Reiss in Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie (1984), made the same shift from the side of professional practice. A translation is an action with a purpose, its skopos, and the purpose determines the strategy; fidelity to the source is one rule among others and ranks below coherence for the receiver. The theory fitted commercial, technical and institutional translation well and literary and sacred texts badly, which is the standing criticism of it.