Research into the nature and role of norms in translation, which began in earnest in the mid-seventies, has led to new ways of looking at some of the key concepts associated with translation and with translation studies, chief among them perhaps the relationships between target and source texts and items subsumed under "equivalence". These discussions—both of norms and of equivalence (in the abstract as well as concrete sense)—have, however, generally been confined to written (especially literary) translation. The present paper represents an attempt to launch a discussion aimed at examining the possibility of extending the notion of translational norms to (oral) interpretation; to be precise, it attempts to pinpoint those factors which encumber both the formation and the extrapolation of norms for interpretation, and examines the validity of subsuming these under the existing discussions of norms in (written) translation.

References

Kopczynski, Andrzej

1980 Conference Interpreting: Some Linguistic and Communicative Problems. Poznan. [Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznanin, Seria filologia angielska Nr. 13.]

Toury, Gideon

1978 “The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation”. James S. Holmes, José Lambert and Raymond van den Broeck, eds. Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies. Leuven: ACCO 1978 83–100. rep. in Toury 1980 : 51–62.

Toury, Gideon

1980 In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University.

Toury, Gideon

1986 “Monitoring Discourse Transfer: A Test-Case for a Developmental Model of Translation”. Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, eds. Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies. Tübingen: Gunter Narr 1986 79–94.