4. The multiplicity of translational norms

The difficulties involved in any attempt to account for translational norms should not be underestimated. These, however, lie first and foremost in two

6. See also my discussion of "Equivalence and Non-Equivalence as a Function of Norms" (Toury 1980a: 63-70).

62 Descriptive translation studies and beyond

features inherent in the very notion of norm, and are therefore not unique to Translation Studies at all: the socio-cultural specificity of norms and their basic instability.

Thus, whatever its exact content, there is absolutely no need for a norm to apply -- to the same extent, or at all -- to all sectors within a society. Even less necessary, or indeed likely, is it for a norm to apply across cultures. In fact, 'sameness' here is a mere coincidence -- or else the result of continuous contacts between subsystems within a culture, or between entire cultural systems, and hence a manifestation of interference. (For some general rules of systemic interference see Even-Zohar 1990: 53-72.) Even then, it is often more a matter of apparent than of a genuine identity. After all, significance is only attributed to a norm by the system in which it is embedded, and the systems remain different even if instances of external behaviour appear the same.

In addition to their inherent specificity, norms are also unstable, changing entities; not because of any intrinsic flaw but by their very nature as norms. At times, norms change rather quickly; at other times, they are more enduring, and the process may take longer. Either way, substantial changes, in translational norms too, quite often occur within one's life-time.

Of course, it is not as if all translators are passive in face of these changes. Rather, many of them, through their very activity, help in shaping the process, as do translation criticism, translation ideology (including the one emanating from contemporary academe, often in the guise of theory), and, of course, various norm-setting activities of institutes where, in many societies, translators are now being trained. Wittingly or unwittingly, they all try to interfere with the 'natural' course of events and to divert it according to their own preferences. Yet, the success of their endeavours is never fully foreseeable. In fact, the relative role of different agents in the overall dynamics of translational norms is still largely a matter of conjecture even for times past, and much more research is needed to clarify it.

Complying with social pressures to constantly adjust one's behaviour to norms that keep changing is of course far from simple, and most people -- including translators, initiators of translation activities and the consumers of their products -- do so only up to a point. Therefore, it is not all that rare to find side by side in a society three types of competing norms, each having its own followers and a position of its own in the culture at large: the ones that domi- nate the center of the system, and hence direct translational behaviour of the so- called mainstream, alongside the remnants of previous sets of norms and the

NORMS IN TRANSLATION 63

rudiments of new ones, hovering in the periphery. This is why it is possible to speak -- and not derogatorily -- of being 'trendy', 'old-fashioned' or 'progressive' in translation (or in any single section thereof) as it is in any other behavioural domain.

One's status as a translator may of course be temporary, especially if one fails to adjust to the changing requirements, or does so to an extent which is deemed insufficient. Thus, as changes of norms occur, formerly 'progressive' translators may soon find themselves just 'trendy', or on occasion as even downright 'passé'. At the same time, regarding this process as involving a mere alternation of generations can be misleading, especially if generations are directly equated with age groups. While there often are correlations between one's position along the 'dated'-'mainstream'-'avant-garde' axis and one's age, these cannot, and should not be taken as inevitable, much less as a starting point and framework for the study of norms in action. Most notably, young people who are in the early phases of their initiation as translators often behave in an extremely epigonic way: they tend to perform according to dated, but still existing norms, the more so if they receive reinforcement from agents holding to dated norms, be they language teachers, editors, or even teachers of translation.

Multiplicity and variation should not be taken to imply that there is no such thing as norms active in translation. They only mean that real-life situ- ations tend to be complex; and this complexity had better be noted rather than ignored, if one is to draw any justifiable conclusions. As already argued (mainly in Chapter 1, Section 3), the only viable way out seems to be to contextualize every phenomenon, every item, every text, every act, on the way to allotting the different norms themselves their appropriate position and valence. This is why it is simply unthinkable, from the point of view of the study of translation as a norm-governed activity, for all items to be treated on a par, as if they were of the same systemic position, the same significance, the same level of representative- ness of the target culture and its constraints. Unfortunately, such an indiscriminate approach has been all too common, and has often led to a complete blurring of the normative picture, sometimes even to the absurd claim that no norms could be detected at all. The only way to keep that picture in focus is to go beyond the establishment of mere 'check-lists' of factors which may occur in a corpus and have the lists ordered, for instance with respect to the status of those factors as characterizing 'mainstream', 'dated' and 'avant-garde' activities, respectively.

This immediately suggests a further axis of contextualization, whose necessity has so far only been implied; namely, the historical one. After all, a norm can only be marked as 'dated' if it was active in a previous period, and if, at