Agency in Structure: An Inquiry into Gideon Toury’s Target-Oriented Perspective

Abstract

The present paper aims to present a rereading of Gideon Toury’s formulation of the target-oriented theory in his seminal work Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond in the hope of making a contribution to the discussion on Toury’s emphasis on structures and regularities, whether or the extent to which this underemphasizes translators’ agency in the theoretical framework, and the research program he has set out for translation studies. In the present re-evaluation of this widely discussed issue, some influential criticisms of Toury’s target-oriented theory over the issue of agency are briefly laid out, and a rereading of Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond in the light of the issue of translators’ agency is presented. Through a close scrutiny of this work, the extent to which target-oriented theory incorporates individual action and decision-making will be discussed mainly with a focus on the relationship between norms and agents of translation, what the interdependence of product, process, and function (as position-in-the-culture) in Toury’s target-oriented theory reveals with respect to the way agency is incorporated in the theory, and the methodological relevance of the concept of contextualization to research into the relationship between individual translators and observation of regularities. This rereading attempts to provide inquiries into how the theory incorporates norms and agency, what the interdependence of product, process, and function (as position-in-the-culture) implicates on the role assigned to agency in the target-oriented theory, Toury’s concept of ‘contextualization’ and its role in painting a broader descriptive picture incorporating agency, and the methodological issues regarding the structure vs. agency debate.

Keywords

• agency
• target-oriented theory
• descriptive translation studies
• norms
• contextualization

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