Professional Documents
Culture Documents
David Katan
Brian Mossops position paper is certainly provocative, and indeed even after repeated
readings I am not sure that I have understood how much of what he suggests can be any-
thing more than just that. If his position is a reaction to what he sees happening in the
volatile world of translation studies (TS), then there is a great deal I agree with. Mossop
is absolutely right that there is no agreement over what TS is, which I believe is partly
to do with the fact that translation competence is still understood only in terms of
other non-translation competences. This automatically makes the discipline open (or vul-
nerable) to other disciplines.
Mossop offers a fully understandable reaction to the more esoteric areas of the acade-
micization of translation, particularly in scholarly journals, which has moved away from
the practice of interlingual translation of words, sentences and texts towards reflection on
ever wider issues, many outside the control of individual practising translators. A recent
example is Michael Cronins Eco-Translation, which argues that translation in the age
of the Anthropocene can play a vital role in the future survival of the planet (2016,
cover) good news since others have claimed that every act of translation is an act of vio-
lence (e.g. Venuti 1996). These fascinating themes, as Mossop hints, attract attention and
funding for academics but not for professionals. Like many of us, he is only too aware that
the cultural turn also brought in cultural studies, which sees translation as primarily a
political act, and consequently focuses on professional practice as a prime agent in sup-
porting the dominant political system. I fully support Mossops plea to have academics
addressing the needs of practising translators, and focusing their theories on the kinds
of texts translators work with.
Mossop is not alone here. Vandeweghe, Vandepitte, and Van de Velde (2007) suggest
that since the early 2000s there has been a general linguistic re-turn, and I agree that
there remains much work to be done in understanding how interlingual translation is
(and should be) performed. But Mossop goes well beyond cultural studies as the
culprit, and points to what he sees as an obsession with difference. While not mention-
ing Skopos theory or the Functional approach, he does single out the 1980s, when the
focus shifted to how translations differ from their sources in order to communicate
with future users in target-language cultures, a shift that, according to Edwin Gentzler,
finally broke the two thousand year old chain of theory revolving around the faithful
vs. free axis (2001, 71). Mossop is completely at odds with this line of thinking,
however, claiming that translators do not want to be rescued from the tyranny of the
job is considered to be a good linguistic transfer of the original, to what extent is the
translator or interpreter concerned with reader or listener reaction?: always, very
much, it depends, not usually, or never? Ideally and in practice.
Regarding the ideal world, the vast majority felt that the T/I should be concerned
(30% replied very much and 56% always). What was significant was the gap
between this concern and reality: Only just over half of those [86%] who believe in the
ideal of focussing on the listener/reader also believe that this is or can be a reality
(Katan 2009, 2728). In a further paper, I reported on an even wider ideal/reality gap:
of the 56% of T/Is who believed that they should [always] be concerned or responsible
for their end-user reaction, only 20% said that this happened in practice a clear sign
of further [low professional] autonomy (Katan 2011, 76). These results strongly
suggest that translators are constrained to follow an invariant stance. In an ideal world,
the majority would like to have the autonomy to mediate between incoming and outgoing.
In any profession, what the majority of professionals actually do is rarely taken as the
best-practice benchmark for what should be done. In an unregulated one like translation,
it would seem even more bizarre to constrain the object of study to what is done, when
we know that there are many translators who would prefer a wider remit.
Mossop has evident distaste for this wider remit, which he sees as an obsessive focus on
variance. He suggests that variant approaches actually have as their aim deliberate
changes or some agenda which makes him or her indifferent to whether most of the
sources meaning is being preserved. The first objection to be made here is that, as
Mossop himself writes, the primary aim of a Functionalist approach is not to look for var-
iance but to communicate with future users in target-language cultures. Hence the
primary focus of a variance approach is likely to be acceptance of variance as a possible
or likely by-product of effective communication rather than the result of a wilful decision
to look for how to change the meaning. Secondly, if we look at Skopos theory, in any of its
versions (see Chesterman 2010), we note an ever-present intratextual fidelity rule, albeit
subordinate to an intertextual rule. Consequently indifference to the source text can
hardly be a prime factor.
Finally, as I understand it, Mossop rejects linking intention with outcome because it is
too complex, and there is a danger of becoming hopelessly vague or trivial. I can under-
stand his frustration with gods-eye all-encompassing abstract diagrams, but that should
not mean that we stop trying to understand to use Goffmans (1974, 8) well-known
aphorism what it is that is going on. This is what one does at university.
On university training, Mossop rightly points to the problem of professionalizing
degrees which are in danger of turning our institutions into vocational centres; the differ-
ence has to do with what Barnett (2016, 122) calls a real universitys focus on discursive
openness and criticality. This is a problem for Mossop, and many of us: how to balance
cognitive skills with the metacognitive. The conviction that intention rather than
outcome should be a central tenet of TS makes it difficult to imagine any form of critical
discourse. Also, it is difficult to imagine any other discipline, as part of an industry, that
gives more importance to intent than outcome.
On a purely practical note, if we take up invariance as our object of study then the
future will not be the bleak one he outlines, that of vocational training, but rather the
signing over of the profession to Google Translate, which follows the invariance principle
to the letter.
4 D. KATAN
Note on contributor
David Katan is professor of English and translation at the University of Salento (Lecce). His recent
research interests concern the status of the translator, translating for tourism and the use of pop-up
glosses in AVT (audiovisual translation). He has published over 70 articles on translation and inter-
cultural communication, including contributions to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation
Studies, the Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies and the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of
Applied Linguistics. His book Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters
and Mediators, is now in its second edition. He is senior editor of Cultus: The Journal of Intercul-
tural Mediation and Communication.
ORCiD
David Katan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7990-8841
TRANSLATION STUDIES 5
References
Bajaj, Bettina. 2009. Meaning. In The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, edited by J.
Munday, 206207. London: Routledge.
Barnett, Ronald. 2016. Understanding the University: Institution, Idea, Possibilities. London:
Routledge.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2010. Skopos Theory: A Retrospective Assessment. In Perspektiven auf
Kommunikation. Festschrift fr Liisa Tittula zum 60, edited by W. Kallmeyer et al., 209225.
Geburtstag. Berlin: SAXA Verlag. Accessed August 4, 2016. http://www.helsinki.fi/~chesterm/
2010a.skopos.html.
Cronin, Michael. 2016. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene.
London: Routledge.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, and Edmund Wilson, ed. 1993. The Crack Up. New York: New Directions.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2001. Contemporary Translation Theories. London: Routledge.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row.
Katan, David. 2009. Translation Theory and Professional Practice: A Global Survey of the Great
Divide. Hermes 42: 111153.
Katan, David. 2011. Occupation or Profession: A Survey of the Translators World. In Profession,
Identity and Status: Translators and Interpreters as an Occupational Group, edited by R. Sela-
Sheffy and M. Shlesinger, 187209. Amsterdam: Benjamin.
Levy, Jir. 1967. Translation as a Decision-Making Process. In To Honor Roman Jakobson, Vol. 2,
11711182. The Hague: Mouton.
Tannen, Deborah. 1998. The Argument Culture: Stopping Americas War of Words. New York, NY:
Ballantine.
Vandeweghe, Willy, UGent Sonia Vandepitte, and Marc Van de Velde. 2007. A Linguistic Return
in Translation Studies? Belgian Journal of Linguistics 21: 19.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1996. Translation as a Social Practice: Or, the Violence of Translation.
Translation Perspectives 9: 195213.