What is it about?
The prehistory of Translation Studies tended to be anecdotal: here's how I translated X, and why, and how I failed. These anecdotes have been attacked as not only prehistorical but pretheoretical; but the fact is that the anecdote remembers situational nuances and complexities that the reductionist theory has forgotten.
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Why is it important?
Yes, theoretical breadth and complexity is important; yes, theory alone is better than the personal anecdote alone. But what about theory INTERTWINED with anecdotes? What about theory TESTING the contextual nuances provided by anecdotes, and anecdotes testing the idealizations of theory?
Perspectives
This was born out of my irritation at an early reviewer of The Translator's Turn (1991) accusing me of "regressing" to the anecdotal level of pretheoretical Translation Studies. I didn't regress; I integrated! I applied Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatism: theory is tested by practice; practice is tested by theory. The paper was presented as a keynote address in a conference organized by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in February, 1998, just five months after the handover, and published in CUHK's TS journal.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nine Theses About Anecdotalism in the Study of Translation (With Special Reference to Sherry Simon, Ed., Culture in Transit), Meta Journal des traducteurs, January 1999, Consortium Erudit,
DOI: 10.7202/003966ar.
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