Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

5.4 Theoretical concepts within the descriptive paradigm  

 

Within this intellectual context, there is nothing obvious or banal in wanting to describe 

translations, rather than “prescribe” what translations should ideally be. Descriptive 

approaches were setting out to discover relations and laws that were in some way 

hidden; they were working on the problems of structuralism. Further, given the terms 

and concepts that had been accumulated in many related disciplines since the Russian 

Formalists, the researchers working on translation were able to draw on a broad range of 

established categories (no one can simply describe in language what they see with the 

eye) and indeed of hypotheses about what they would find. The underlying approach 

was certainly empirical, in the sense that these researchers were going out to test their 

ideas on actual data. But it would be quite misleading to reduce the approach to 

empiricism alone (as is done, for example, in Merino and Rabadán 2004), as if there 

were no properly theoretical concepts at work. 

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In the following sections we will briefly describe the main concepts at work 

within the descriptive paradigm. In the next chapter we will look at the larger concepts 

of norms and laws.