[规范性模型22.docVIP

Normative model As it has been conceived in Western culture, translation theory is normative. Since its origins in Ciceros instructions to the orator and Horaces instructions to the poet, Western translation theory has restrictively consisted of instructions to someone on how to translate: CICERO (see Latin TRADITION) and Horace tell their readers not to rework foreign texts in Latin word for word, like slavish translators, but freely, like an orator (as Cicero says), or like someone claiming private property in public ground (as Horace says). Translators in those days were thought of as blind literalists, and both Cicero and Horace wanted to warn people translating orations or literary works from Greek into Latin against acting like translators - not, in other words, to obey the implicit translation norm but to develop a new, freer, more creative norm. These instructions were picked up by JEROME (see LATIN TRADITION)in his letter to Pammachius (AD 395) and further articulated: where Cicero and Horace had urged free IMITATION rather than word-for-word translation, Jerome coined the obvious polar opposite to word-for-word, sense-for-sense translation (see FREE TRANSLATION), and argued strenuously for its appropriateness (i.e. normativeness) except in the case of Scripture,’ where even the word order holds a mystery. And the die was cast: in the millennium and a half since his writing translators and translation theorists have followed the lead of Cicero, Horace, and Jerome in assuming not only that a translation should be either faithful or free, word-for-word or sense-for-sense, but that a translation theory should take a stand between those two extremes, should tell translators how to translate. So deep-seated is the normative model in Western translation theory that it is difficult to talk about it, just as it is difficult for the proverbial fish to talk about the water it swims in. It is far easier to talk about those few theorists who do not prescribe