1. Growth and Development of Translation Studies
Prepared by
Dr. M.A.A. Farooq,
Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
Central University of Jammu

2. Introduction
Translation Studies, often referred to as translatology, has of late been one of the most interesting areas for writers, researchers, and scholars. It is primarily an academic inter discipline focussing on systematic study of theory, application of translation and interpretation. The term first found its expression in Amsterdam based American scholar James S Holmes’ article “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” and today, translation studies has gained ground as an indispensable part of comparative literature.

3. History of Translation in the West
Eugene Nida places the beginning of translation with the production of the Septuagint which is considered to be the first translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek. It was carried out by seventy-two translators, and it provides us with the basic categories of the history of this practice. Nida, American scholar states that translation itself was a science, a theory that was subsequently rejected by others in the second half of the century. The scholar Mary Snell-Hornby (1988) defines the concept as an interaction process between the author, the translator and the reader. Hornby mentions the complexities involved in the process of translation,”Translation is a complex act of communication in which the SL–author, the reader as translator and translator as TL–author and the TL–reader interact.” The translator starts from a present frame (the text and its linguistic components). Based on the frame of the text, the translator-reader builds up his own scenes depending on his own level of experience and his internalized knowledge of the material concerned . According to Carbonell, “Translation is a form of communication and a means of achieving things. However, in translation the original communicative act is relocated to a different setting, where different actors perform for different purposes: there is a mediation mechanism which qualifies the whole act at different levels.”

4. Translation in the 20th century
As an attempt to systematise the study of translation as a discipline, within Comparative Literature, translation workshops were promoted in the 1960s in some American universities. The University of Iowa and The University of Princeton were the pioneers in the field. During the 1950s and 1960s, systematic linguistic-oriented studies of translation began to appear. In 1958, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet carried a contrastive comparison of French and English in Quebec. In 1964, Eugene Nida published Toward a Science of Translating, a manual for Bible translation influenced to some extent by  Chomsky’s Generative Garammar. In 1965, John C. Catford theorized translation from a linguistic perspective. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Czech scholar Jiri Levy and the Slovak scholars Anton Popovic and František Miko workedon the stylists of literary translation from a literary translation.  These initial steps and research on literary translation were collected in James S Holmes' paper at the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics held in Copenhagen in In that paper, "The name and nature of translation studies", Holmes called for the consolidation of a separate discipline and proposed a classification of the field. A visual "map" of Holmes' proposal was later be presented by  Gideon Toury in his 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond.

5. Cont…
Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak in her The Politics of Translation  (1998)considers translation as an important approach in pursuing the larger feminist agenda of achieving women's `solidarity'. The task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a sign to the working of gendered agency. Translation can give access to a large number of feminists working in various languages and cultures.

6. Boom in translation studies
Translation studies steadily developed in the following years. In the 1980s and 1990s, two very different paradigms developed, breaking away from previous equivalence-based research.
On the one hand, descriptive translation studies (a term coined after Toury's 1995 book Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond) aims at building an empirical descriptive discipline, to fill one section of the Holmes map. The idea that scientific methodology could be applicable to cultural products had been developed by the Russian Formalists in the early years of the 20th century, and had been recovered by various researchers in Comparative Literature.

7. Cont…
It was now applied to literary translation. Part of this application was Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory in which translated literature is seen as a sub-system of the receiving or target literary system. Gideon Toury bases his theory on the need to consider translations “facts of the target culture” for the purposes of research. The concepts of “manipulation” and "patronage" have also been developed in relation to literary translations.

8. Translation in the 21st century
A significantparadigm shift in translation theory can be dated from 1984 in Europe when two books in German: Foundation for a General Theory of Translation by Katharina Reiss  and Hans Vermeer and Translatorial Action (Translatorisches Handeln) by Justa Holz-Mänttäri were published. From these two came what is known as Skopos theory, which gives priority to the purpose to be fulfilled by the translation instead of prioritizing equivalence.
The cultural turn meant still another step forward in the development of the discipline. It was sketched by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere in Translation - History - Culture, and quickly represented by the exchanges between translation studies and other area studies and concepts: gender studies, cannibalism, post- colonialism or cultural studies, among others.
At the turn of the 21st century, sociology (Wolf and Fukari) and historiography (Pym) take a relevant role, but also globalization (Cronin) and the use of new technologies (O’Hagan) are introduced into translation studies.
In the following decades, the growth of translation studies became visible in other ways. First, with the growth of translation schools and courses at university level. In 1995, a study of 60 countries revealed there were 250 institutions/ bodies at university level offering courses in translation or interpreting. In 2013, the same database listed 501 translator-training institutions . Accordingly, there has been a growth of conferences/ workshops on translation, translation journals and translation-related publications. The visibility acquired by translation has also led to the development of national and international associations of translation studies.

9. Future of Translation Studies
The growing variety of paradigms appears to be one of the possible sources of conflict in the discipline.
As early as 1999, the conceptual gap between non-essentialist and empirical approaches came up for debate at the Vic Forum on Training Translators and Interpreters: New Directions for the Millennium. The discussants, Rosemary Arrojo and Andrew Chesterman, explicitly sought common shared ground for both approaches. Interdisciplinarity has made the creation of new paradigms possible, as most of the developed theories grew from contact with other disciplines like linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology or historiography. At the same time, it might have provoked the fragmentation of translation studies as a discipline on its own right.
A second source of conflict rises from the breach between theory and practice. As the prescriptivism of the earlier studies gives room to descriptivism and theorization, professionals see less applicability of the studies.

10. Cont…..
However, translation today has received a greater impetus from translators from different quarters of the world. Lawrence Venuiti, while discussing ‘translator’s invisibility’ focuses on ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’, Gayatri Charavart Spivak advocates for a ‘complete surrender’ to the original text and Sussan Basnett suggests opines that translation needs to promoted as it can carry knowledge beyond boundary.