Pym - Method in Translation History (1998)

 METHOD IN TRANSLATION HISTORY

Preface

[O livro todo se constrói sobre críticas do trabalho Toury]

• Quatro principios
• 1. TH deve explicar porque as traduções ocorreram naquele espaço-tempo. Causas sociais.
• 2. O objeto central do estudo deve ser o traduor, pois só ele é passível de causa social.
• 3. Foco na condição social do tradutor.
• 4. TH adereça os problemas de agora, prioridade do presente. Em favor do envolvimento subjetivo, já que a questão central é o humano tradutor.

History

• No mapa de Holmes e nas evoluções propostas posteriormente, não há uma área dedicada para hist da trad.
• Tece várias cirticas ao mapa, não só em relação a historiografia 2-4.
• Definições
• Translation history (‘historiography’ is a less pretty term for the same thing) is a set of discourses predicating the changes that have occurred or have actively been prevented in the field of translation. Its field includes actions and agents leading to translations (or non-translations), the effects of translations (or non-translations), theories about translation, and a long etcetera of causally related phenomena.5
• Arqueolodia da trad: quem, como, quando, onde, para quem e qual efeito.
• Criticisimo: trad julgar o valor da trad para sua epoca e seu legado. 
• Explicação: Porque artefatos exitem onde e quando existem e como se relacionam com o todo. Causalidade das coisas. "Porque' é a pergunta mais importante.
• Criticaa toury 7
• "doing hisotry is also a matter of communicating the results of research. 8
• Maior parte da pesquisa histórica até aqui lida com teorias de tradução, e menos com tradutores. Contudo a teoria mascara a prática que é um melhor objeto historiográfico
• Motivos: 1) ajudar a entender relaç~ioes interculturais; 2) historia ajuda na otmada de decisões; 3) ajuda a afirma a especificidade intercultura

Importance

• É preciso fazer perguntas que sejam importantes ppara a sociedade.
• Não cair em uma armadilha empirista. Nem identificar 'armas" cientificas com o método com um todo, deve-se lembrar da subjetivisdade do pesquisador.

Lists

• "Little history can be construed from the analysis of isolated translations" 39
• Bibliografias parecem extinguir a subjetividade, mas não o fazem. Catalogos são táo uteis quanto sua completude.
• Custo beneficio conta na criação de catalogos 50
• Completude é dificil devido ao número de pessoas, e portanto critérios, que participam do processo ao longo do tempo. 51

Working definitions

• "If you want a catalogue, you put things in. If you want a corpus, you throw things out." 56
• Critérios inclusivo (agrupar o maior número possível de entradas) e exclusivo (filtragem a partir de um corpus maior). Critérios atacados pelo descritivistas, relativistas e descontrucionistas por motivos diferentes.
• Sobre o uso de paratextos:
•  One way to recognize the substantiality of the object is to retain as much as possible of its surface level, its words, before reducing it to a series of functions that may or may not fit our definitions. In the case of translations, these surface fragments are most usefully the ‘paratexts’, a term used by Genette (1978) to cover all the textual material that introduces a text proper (cover, author’s name, title, blurb, table of contents, and so on, although Genette strangely fails to look at the translator’s name or other translational signs, which are clearly parts of paratexts). Elements of paratexts – not the ‘text proper’ – are carried over into publisher’s catalogues, library catalogues and the lists of all kinds by which they eventually come to us. Obviously, what is carried over is not the ‘function’ of the text as a translation or nontranslation but the words by which it might so be marked. As far as possible, the words should be reproduced in our own lists. If the paratext says ‘imitation’, ‘frei nach Zola’, ‘wortgetreu in deutsche Prosa’ or whatever, that is exactly what should appear in our corpora, quite independently of the functions we may later attribute to or construe from these terms.  61-2
• Definições provisórias devem ser cegas.
• Working definitions are valuable only to the extent that they work on a particular corpus, with respect to particular preconceptions, and in view of a particular cost-effective result. Little of the following material will see the light of day within serious explanatory history. 67

Frequencies

• "Be careful with statistics" 74 [várias criticas a venuti]
•  Retraduções: Passivas, uma não influencia a outra (podem demonstrar mudanças linguisticas em um longo tempo ou serem resultado de uma rivalidade entre duas edições). Ativas: várias versões por um msm tradutor; em casos de encomenda; rivalidade 82-3
• Whereas re-edition would tend to reinforce the validity of the previous translation, retranslation strongly challenges that validity, introducing a marked negativity into the relationship at the same time as it affirms the desire to bring a particular text closer. Because of this negativity mixed with crosscultural movement, active retranslations are a particularly subtle index of historical importance. 83
• The comparative analysis of active retranslations, however, tends to locate causes far closer to the translator, especially in the entourage of patrons, publishers, readers and intercultural politics (although clearly not excluding monocultural influences from any side). The study of active retranslations would thus seem better positioned to yield insights into the nature and workings of translation itself, into its own special range of disturbances, without blindly surrendering causality to target-culture norms. 83 
• Curvas parabolicas constantes podem demosntrar flutuações d einteresse.

Networks

• Muito específico pra ser útil pra mim no momento.

Norms and systems

• Modos de comparar trads (é melhor que isso seja feito com um objetivo em mente, mas sem abandonar a possibilidade de encontrar fenomenos mais atraentes)
• 1. Comparar com o original
• 2. Comparar com outros textos, como se ela não fosse uma tradução
• 3. Comparar diferentes traduções do mesmo texto (de preferencia na esma lingua e sendo ativas). Também é possível comparar trads prévias com a sua própria.
• Assumir a exiastencia de normas é bastante complicado. Lista os problemas:
• Since norms are constraints, one should be able to say what they are constraining (social tension and debate), but this is overlooked by the dominant emphasis on stability rather than change. 
•  In keeping with the search for stability, the study of norms has paid little attention to the active contradictions between what is done in translations and what is said about translations. 
•  There is no reason why translation norms should be culture specific (i.e. from one culture only, and throughout that culture), and yet this would seem to be a frequent assumption. 
•  The study of norms thus tends to make the object exterior to us, allowing the past to be used for ideologically relativist ends. 115
• Critica severamente os "sistemas e polissistemas".

Regimes

• John Ruggie in 1975. He defined a regime as Aa set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organizational and financial commitments, which have been accepted by a group of states@ (1975:570). This means that if different countries are going to negotiate or generally do business, their shared regime says how they are going to go about it.
• sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors= expectations converge in a given area of international relations. Principles are beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude. Norms are standards of behaviour defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision-making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice. (cited in Krasner 1983:2) 125
• Útil, pois: 1) posiciona a trad nas RI; 2) Ajuda a expliar relações de poder; 3) já tem um lugar para as normas.; 4) Parecem sistemas; contudo
• r. The specific norms of international regimes belong to quite a different kind of space (they are rigorously not restricted to any one country); regimes are likely to represent and define professional identities rather than anything ensuing from cultural traditions or birthright (they are the stuff of working negotiators, be they Americans, Russians or whatever); they are likely to be more transitory and narrower in function than the norms and systems so far studied in translation history (especially to the extent that a regime need not address issues that have been settled); and they are used to achieve specific aims, to find a kind of gold (which we might call cooperation, crosscultural trust, or understanding). 126
• Procurar por debates. Os pontos comuns entre as culturas constituem o regime.
• [SN aplicada no regime das antologias não traduzidas do século XX 137-8]
• Papel do custo na formação do regime
• Translation is a transaction cost. If a translator takes too long, requires too much pay or produces work that is too difficult to understand, the regime requiring the translation will fail. Alternatively, if translation were an automatic, mechanical operation tending toward zero cost to and from all languages and cultures, it would be of no consequence at all for the stability of crosscultural relationships. Between these two extremes, translation may structure transaction costs adequate to the formation of regimes. 141
•  Os custos de formação para um novo regime podem manter o antigo existindo por muito tempo.

Causes

• Não diferencia ccs humanas das exatas levou a problemas com relação a explicações de causalidade:
• Very different things like translators= preferences, the nature of translation as reproduction, publishing contracts and collective reaction to wartime defeat thus become a series of hypotheses each of which is subject to the same kind of empirical testing. In basic systems theory, causation is an affair of invariable sequences and concomitant variations. [...] Yet this kind of thought is very weak in practical terms. For a start, no one can be sure of any causal directionality. 146
• A second consequence of empiricism is based on this uncertainty. Since we can describe effects but we cannot actually know direct causes, the resulting uncertainty of our hypotheses can only really be accommodated by an appeal to probabilistic relations. 147
• Acredita que as causas devem ser entendidas aristotelicamente.
• Material or initial cause (causa materialis): Everything that precedes the translating and is necessary for its achievement: the (assumed) source text, language, communication technology, and so on. 
•  Final cause (causa finalis or causa ut): The purpose justifying the existence of the translation, its utilitas, the use that is to be made of it, no matter whether this be a positional function within a target culture or the ideal completion of an action. 
•  Formal cause (causa formalis): The historical norms that allow a translation to be accepted as a translation, no matter who is doing the accepting (the client, the receivers, the translator, other translators). 
•  Efficient cause (causa efficiens or causa quod): The translator, be it individual or collective, along with everything specific to the translator=s collective position. 149
• Aristotle holds that change occurs in four categories: substance (generation and destruction), quantity (increase and diminution), quality (alteration) and place (motion) (Physics 200b.33; Categories 15a.13). Translation primarily responds to changes in place, which is the category concerning both object transfers and subject transfers. A text changes in quality because it moves through space and time, although there are all kinds of constraints on its relative elasticity and points of semantic rupture. Translation can be seen as a way of introducing further qualitative change in order to counteract or capitalize on the change in place. [...] Within this limited schema, one change might be said to explain the other. The text is translated because it has been moved or is going to be moved. Even if the movement comes chronologically after the moment of translation, the change in quality still presupposes the change of place, and not the other way round. We might say that, given these two changes, the change concerning quality is caused by the change concerning place. Or more simply, translation is caused by material transfer (change of place), making transfer a material or initial cause no matter what the actual order of events. 150
• Contudo ainda há um problema de direcionalidade causal. Quando "o texto é movido para ser traduzido", a tradução é sua causa final. Quando "o texto é traduzido porque foi movido", o texto é causa material da tradução.
• Sobr eo tradutor enquanto causa eficiente:
• The efficient cause of a translation is the individual or collective translator, if only because you need a translator – or the mechanical or illusory extension of one – in order to have a translation. There would seem to be little reason to deny the translator a properly causal role. Yet this is exactly what is done whenever one of the other modes of causation is accorded an exclusive function. If everything is already in the source text, then the translator becomes a mechanical extension of that text; if everything is decided by the target system, then the translator is merely a bearer of functions within that system; if the purpose of the translation is everything, then the translator is merely a person expertly privy to that purpose; and if the world of forms were the end of the story, the translator would be the instrument of fictions, and not the other way around. However, given that none of the above categories can convincingly exclude the others, there are grounds to hope that some kind of active causation can ensue from the translator. People can actually change things. 157

Translators

• Significados de "tradutor'
• figura discursiva que verte um texto para outro idioma;
• tradutor enquanto profissional (quase uma máquina);
• tradutor enquanto pessoa com corpo;
• Monoprofissionalismo e foco em especialização dos programas de treinamento de tradutores vai contra o zeitgeist trabalhista atual. Isso influencia analises historicas que reduzem pessoas a apenas tradutores. Multiprof. remonta a Lutero;
• Tradutores tem interesses pessoais, inclusive afinidade com os autores que traduzem.
• Tradutores podem se mover.
• [Ver modo de tradução quase fabril no final do século XIX 174]

Intercultures

• I use the term >interculture= to refer to beliefs and practices found in intersections or overlaps of cultures, where people combine something of two or more cultures at once. For me, interculturality is not to be confused with the fact that many cultures can be found within the one society or political unit (the term for which is >multiculturality=), nor with the fact that things can move from one culture to another (which should be referred to as >crosscultural= transfer). [...] an unspecified number of translators can be seen as members of intercultures or as having some degree of interculturality. 177
• Levefere, Venuti e Toury acreditam que o tradutor pertence a target culture. Binarismo nos TS:
• Note that Schleiermacher=s insistence of binary belonging – people should be one side or the other – was invested in his formulation of two mutually exclusive translation methods, insisting that the translator work either to domesticate the foreign text or to maintain its foreignness. This fundamental binarism, usually expressed as fidelity to one of two levels, has survived in more recent pairs such as >formal= versus >dynamic= (Nida), >semantic= versus >communicative= (Newmark), >anti-illusory= versus >illusory= (Levý), >adequate= versus >acceptable= (Even-Zohar, Toury), >overt= versus >covert= (House), >documental= versus >instrumental= (Nord), >resistant= versus >transparent= (Venuti), and probably a good deal more. On the surface, over and above the many subtle differences between these pairs, it seems translators should look one way or the other, since there is no room for a middle term corresponding to the position of the translators themselves. The way theorists think about cultures maps strangely well onto the way they formulate translation strategies. 181
• Here is the basic hypothesis: Precisely because interculturality implies mistrust and doubt, intercultural translators are ideologically represented and institutionalized in such a way as to dispel mistrust and doubt. The entire discourse on fidelity, which had a certain basis in the translation of sacred texts, was thus dragged across into the secular domain (Copeland 1991). As interculturality became more developed with the rise of urban centres, becoming a phenomenon of the city rather than of geopolitical borderlands, translating was made to look like an affair of sacred bonds. Thus, if translators can be shown to be significantly involved in situations of cultural overlap, the institutionalisation of translation might be expected to cover over all trace of interculturality. This is perhaps why some of our translation theories insist that translators belong to target cultures. 186

Interdisciplinarity

• Argumentos históricos são pro presente não pro passado.
• Fala da fragmentação do campo 197
• Intercultura studies 200-1