What is it about?
The paper suggests a new approach to translational norm theory based on an article by Daniel Kahneman from 1986, based on each individual's counterfactual affective responses to unpleasant surprises and repetition.
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Why is it important?
Norm theory in translation studies tends to be focused on the norms themselves and to neglect the phenomenology of norm-formation; this approach explains how norms come to be experienced as such.
Perspectives
Right after this article was published in 2020, my former coeditor at Target, Haidee Kotze, asked me for a copy of it, and I sent it to her. It turned out that she and Sandra Halverson were writing a critique of both my norm theory and Anthony Pym's risk-management theory, and that came out in 2021--although their brief was that their model could SUBSUME mine but render Pym's entirely unnecessary. Halverson, Sandra L., and Haidee Kotze. 2021. “Sociocognitive Constructs in Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS): Do We Really Need Concepts Like Norms and Risk When We Have a Comprehensive Usage-Based Theory of Language?” In Sandra L. Halverson and Álvaro Marín García, eds., Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies, 51-79. London and New York: Routledge. I then responded to their article in the Norms keyword of The Behavioral Economics of Translation (Routledge, 2023).
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reframing translational norm theory through 4EA cognition, Translation Cognition & Behavior, May 2020, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/tcb.00037.rob.
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