Abstract

Focusing on Gideon Toury’s ‘translational norms’, this article reconsiders in-depth meanings of the term ‘norms’ and explores possibilities to develop methodological approaches for relating the ‘norms’ to Bourdieusian concepts of field and habitus. Also, its application to localization is taken into consideration as a part of case study for my future research project. According to Toury (1995), translation is a norm-governed activity; however, the term ‘norms’ are understood differently among researchers and practitioners. Practitioners treat norms in a prescriptive sense telling them what the translation should be, whereas researchers from descriptive and pure translation studies regard them as descriptive statements stating what the translation is. The difference is captured in terms of a descriptive aspect in this paper. In turn, the descriptive ‘norms’ are compared with Bourdieusian model of habitus as well as field; specifically, the two methods to study norms, ‘textual’ and ‘extratextual’, suggested by Toury, are reduced into ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, respectively. In the last part of the paper, the application of this method to a case study, translation practice in localization fields, are touched on, with raising further research questions that need to be addressed.