Toury's model in action

Toury (1995) presents a series of case studies, including an 'exemplary' study of conjoint phrases in Hebrew TTs. Conjoint phrases or binomials are pairs of near-synonyms that function together as a single unit. Examples Toury gives from English are able and talented and law and order; and, from German, nie und nimmer. He discusses (pp. 103-4) the significance of such phrases in Hebrew literature, indicating that their use is prevalent in old written Hebrew texts from the Bible onwards and in Hebrew texts from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, when the language was struggling to adapt to modern writing and was under the influence of imported literary models. However, the preference for conjoint phrases has declined over the past fifty years, now that Hebrew is a more confident and central literature. Neverthe­less, Toury (p. 105) suggests that the number of such phrases in Hebrew translations tends to be higher than in Hebrew STs and that translations also contain more newly coined or 'free' combinations (rather than fixed phrases). He supports this with examples from Hebrew translations of chil­dren's literature, of Goethe and of a story by Heinrich Boll {Ansichten eines Clownes). In the latter case, the translator's very frequent use of conjoint phrases to translate single lexical items in German produces a TT that is almost 30 per cent longer than the ST. The effect, in a translation published in 1971, is also to make the Hebrew seem very dated.

From these findings, Toury puts forward a possible generalization to be tested in future studies across languages and cultures. The claim (p. Ill) is that frequent use of conjoint phrases, particularly in place of single lexical items in the ST, 'may represent a universal of translation into systems which are young, or otherwise "weak" '. The consideration of translated literature as

DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION STUDIES 117

part of a hierarchical system shows the way DTS interlinks with polysystem theory.

The final stage of Toury's model is the application of the findings. An example is his own translation of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where Toury says he has deliberately used frequent conjoint phrases in Hebrew in order to create 'a parodistic air of "stylistic archaism"' (p. 112).