If translation and linguistics were married, they would have ‘issues.’One of those issues concerns a felt lack of support:‘Linguistics alone won’t help us,’wrote the German translation scholar Hans Vermeer in 1987, and he gave his reasons:‘First, because translating is not merely and not even primarily a linguistic process. Second, because linguistics has not yet formulated the right questions to tackle our problems. So let’s look somewhere else’(Vermeer 1987: 29). That sounded like divorce. The problem was not that translators had somehow stopped working on language. After all, any knowledge about language, especially about texts, is potentially useful to trainee translators and translation scholars; a ‘linguistic approach’to translation theory is reported as being taught in 95 percent of 41 translation schools across Europe and North America (Ulrych 2005: 20); countless textbooks for translators run through the basics of several levels of linguistic analysis. The traditional linguistic approaches nevertheless concern languages and texts, the things translators work on. They mostly do not analyze the fact of translation itself, minimally seen through the relations between a text and its possible renditions–they are mostly not linguistics of translation, of the things translators do, and the ways they do it. That is why Vermeer felt there was a lack of support.Vermeer’s complaint echoed similar grumbles from the French translation scholar Georges Mounin, who was a little more explicit back in the 1960s:‘As a distinctive linguistic operation and a linguistic fact sui generis, translation has so far been absent from the linguistic science reflected in our major treatises …
If translation and linguistics were married, they would have ‘issues.’One of those issues concerns a felt lack of support:‘Linguistics alone won’t help us,’wrote the German translation scholar Hans Vermeer in 1987, and he gave his reasons:‘First, because translating is not merely and not even primarily a linguistic process. Second, because linguistics has not yet formulated the right questions to tackle our problems. So let’s look somewhere else’(Vermeer 1987: 29). That sounded like divorce. The problem was not that translators had somehow stopped working on language. After all, any knowledge about language, especially about texts, is potentially useful to trainee translators and translation scholars; a ‘linguistic approach’to translation theory is reported as being taught in 95 percent of 41 translation schools across Europe and North America (Ulrych 2005: 20); countless textbooks for translators run through the basics of several levels of linguistic analysis. The traditional linguistic approaches nevertheless concern languages and texts, the things translators work on. They mostly do not analyze the fact of translation itself, minimally seen through the relations between a text and its possible renditions–they are mostly not linguistics of translation, of the things translators do, and the ways they do it. That is why Vermeer felt there was a lack of support.Vermeer’s complaint echoed similar grumbles from the French translation scholar Georges Mounin, who was a little more explicit back in the 1960s:‘As a distinctive linguistic operation and a linguistic fact sui generis, translation has so far been absent from the linguistic science reflected in our major treatises …