Reconsideration Of The Relationship Between Language And Culture In DTS

Since 1970s, Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), as one of the important influential schools of thought, have developed rapidly after J. S. Holmes' conforming and categorizing work. Itama Even-Zohar's Polysystem theory enabled Translation Studies to discover a descriptive, target-oriented, functional and systemic approach, which offers translation studies an escape from the static analysis of shifts and the traditional repeated linguistic arguments on equivalence. Later on, this approach is further improved by Toury, who highlights the study of relationship among writers, works, readers and translation norms between the source and target systems. The cultural turn can also be seen as the further development of DTS since it is just a "slogan" (Zohar). Thus translation studies have been brought to a new era.Scholars from the descriptive school attempt to study translation from a macro perspective and focus on cultural factors like politics, economics and ideology in their research. However, with the abused use of the culturally oriented approach, some scholars tend to believe that DTS has completely given up the study of language, which results in the trend to return translation to text, subject and ethics.Through discussing the relationship between language and culture in DTS, this thesis aims to find out whether DTS has discarded the study of language and the root causes why some scholars call for returning translation studies to text, subject and ethics. A distinction is also made between the micro-culture focusing on translation strategies in PTS and macro-culture emphasizing the interaction between translation and culture in DTS. Moreover, the thesis also covers a case study on Tymoczko's Translation in a Postcolonial Context—Early Irish Literature in English Translation to provide evidence.