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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 26:1 (2014) ► pp.63–97

How devoted can translators be?

Revisiting the subservience hypothesis

| Université de Montréal

In a seminal contribution published in Target in 1998, Daniel Simeoni argued for a habitus-governed model of explanation for translation and suggested that subservience might be a defining feature of this habitus, a primordial norm. The objective of the present article is twofold. First, it aims to recontextualize the ‘subservience hypothesis’ by shedding light on the empirical work underlining it. Second, following the approach developed in Simeoni (2001), the author tests again the hypothesis through textual analysis, by studying the early translation history into French of a textbook entitled Marketing Management by Philip Kotler. The author explores to what extent traces of the primordial norm, as defined by Simeoni (2001), can be found in the first four French editions of this scholarly text produced over the period (1967–1981), two of which were signed by a professional translator and the others by a marketing scholar.

Keywords: habitus, Philip Kotler, primordial norm, social sciences, marketing, Daniel Simeoni, subservience, translation language
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The empirical basis of the subservience hypothesis
    • 1.1On the origins of subservience
    • 1.2Finding traces of the translator’s devotion in contemporary translations
  • 2. Marketing Management as translation, in translation
    • 2.1Notes on corpus, authors, and method
    • 2.2Kotler’s Marketing Management (1967–1980): moving toward universality
    • 2.3Translating Marketing Management into French
    • 2.4Updating one’s own translation
  • 3.Discussion
    • 3.1Interpreting translatorial choices
    • 3.2Distinguishing different types of habituses
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.26.1.03buz
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