Laws'of translation

Toury hopes that the cumulative identification of norms in descriptive studies will enable the formulation of probabilistic 'laws' of translation and thence of 'universals of translation'. The tentative laws he proposes are:

1 The law of growing standardization (pp. 267-74), which states that 'in translation, textual relations obtaining in the original are often modified, sometimes to the point of being totally ignored, in favour of [more] habitual options offered by a target repertoire' (p. 268). This refers to the

116 SYSTEMS THEORIES

disruption of the ST patterns in translation and the selection of lin­guistic options that are more common in the TL. Thus, for example, there will a tendency towards a general standardization and loss of vari­ation in style in the TT, or at least an accommodation to target culture models. This is especially the case if, as commonly occurs, translation assumes a weak and peripheral position in the target system. 2 The law of interference (1995: 274-9), which sees interference from ST to TT as 'a kind of default'. Interference refers to ST linguistic features (mainly lexical and syntactical patterning) being copied in the TT, either 'negatively' (because they create non-normal TT patterns) or 'positively' (the existence of features in the ST that will not be non-normal in the TT makes them more likely to be used by the translator). Toury (p. 278) considers tolerance of interference to depend on sociocultural factors and the prestige of the different literary systems: there is greater toler­ance when translating from a prestigious language or culture, especially if the target language or culture is 'minor'. These laws are further discussed in section 7.2.4 below.