Translation Theory Today: A Call for Transfer Theory

spirit of the original, that the meaning of a text means both content and style, and so on. Not to speak of such approaches where norms are either overtly or covertly stated, i.e., where we are told how translations should look or how they should be conceived of in terms of one or another evaluative norm. This does not happen only at such conferences where innocent translators, never before exposed to contemporary knowledge, rediscover with great amazement time-honored commonplaces. It may very well occur even when so-called professionals meet together. Obviously, this is caused partly by simple ignorance: as with medicine, literature and child psychology, everybody is an expert without even suspecting that there are things to be studied. Advanced studies are accessible as yet only to a relatively small number of professionals. But when we speak of translation theory today, it does not seem valuable to waste time reviewing everything that is being published in the field. It is rather that body of hypotheses which is now crystallizing and which may constitute a more developed theory that I believe worthwhile to consider, no matter how little known it may be. There has recently evolved a set of hypotheses which analyzes in the context of the sign-system mechanism of human production rather than in terms of isolated verbal, literary, stylistic or cultural types. Moreover, it seems that a kind of functional approach is gaining ground in which the aggregate of hypothesized functions within the verbal sign