Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology. The term “translation studies” was coined by the Amsterdam-based American scholar James S. Holmes in his 1972 paper “The name and nature of translation studies”, which is considered a foundational statement for the discipline. Writers in English occasionally use the term "translatology" (and less commonly "traductology") to refer to translation studies, and the corresponding French term for the discipline is usually traductologie (as in the Société Française de Traductologie). In the United States, there is a preference for the term "translation and interpreting studies" (as in the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association), although European tradition includes interpreting within translation studies (as in the European Society for Translation Studies).
History
Early studies
Historically, translation studies has long been "prescriptive" (telling translators how to translate), to the point that discussions of translation that were not prescriptive were generally not considered to be about translation at all. When historians of translation studies trace early Western thought about translation, for example, they most often set the beginning at the renowned orator Cicero's remarks on how he used translation from Greek to Latin to improve his oratorical abilities—an early description of what Jerome ended up calling sense-for-sense translation. The descriptive history of interpreters in Egypt provided by Herodotus several centuries earlier is typically not thought of as translation studies—presumably because it does not tell translators how to translate. In China, the discussion on how to translate originated with the translation of Buddhist sutras during the Han dynasty.
Calls for an academic discipline In 1958, at the Fourth Congress of Slavists in Moscow, the debate between linguistic and literary approaches to translation reached a point where it was proposed that the best thing might be to have a separate science that was able to study all forms of translation, without being wholly within linguistics or wholly within literary studies. Within comparative literature, translation workshops were promoted in the 1960s in some American universities like the University of Iowa and Princeton. During the 1950s and 1960s, systematic linguistic-oriented studies of translation began to appear. In 1958, the French linguists Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet carried out a contrastive comparison of French and English. In 1964, Eugene Nida published Toward a Science of Translating, a manual for Bible translation influenced to some extent by Harris's transformational grammar. In 1965, J. C. Catford theorized translation from a linguistic perspective. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Czech scholar Jiří Levý and the Slovak scholars Anton Popovič and František Miko worked on the stylistics of literary translation. These initial steps toward research on literary translation were collected in James S. Holmes' paper at the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics held in Copenhagen in 1972. In that paper, "The name and nature of translation studies", Holmes asked for the consolidation of a separate discipline and proposed a classification of the field. A visual "map" of Holmes' proposal was later presented by Gideon Toury in his 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Before the 1990s, translation scholars tended to form particular schools of thought, particularly within the prescriptive, descriptive and Skopos paradigms. Since the "cultural turn" in the 1990s, the discipline has tended to divide into separate fields of inquiry, where research projects run parallel to each other, borrowing methodologies from each other and from other academic disciplines.
Schools of thought The main schools of thought on the level of research have tended to cluster around key theoretical concepts, most of which have become objects of debate.
Equivalence Through to the 1950s and 1960s, discussions in translation studies tended to concern how best to attain "equivalence". The term "equivalence" had two distinct meanings, corresponding to different schools of thought. In the Russian tradition, "equivalence" was usually a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic forms, or a pair of authorized technical terms or phrases, such that "equivalence" was opposed to a range of "substitutions". However, in the French tradition of Vinay and Darbelnet, drawing on Bally, "equivalence" was the attainment of equal functional value, generally requiring changes in form. Catford's notion of equivalence in 1965 was as in the French tradition. In the course of the 1970s, Russian theorists adopted the wider sense of "equivalence" as something resulting from linguistic transformations. At about the same time, the Interpretive Theory of Translation introduced the notion of deverbalized sense into translation studies, drawing a distinction between word correspondences and sense equivalences, and showing the difference between dictionary definitions of words and phrases (word correspondences) and the sense of texts or fragments thereof in a given context (sense equivalences). The discussions of equivalence accompanied typologies of translation solutions (also called "procedures", "techniques" or "strategies"), as in Fedorov (1953) and Vinay and Darbelnet (1958). In 1958, Loh Dianyang's Translation: Its Principles and Techniques (英汉翻译理论与技巧) drew on Fedorov and English linguistics to present a typology of translation solutions between Chinese and English. In these traditions, discussions of the ways to attain equivalence have mostly been prescriptive and have been related to translator training.
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