ABSTRACT
This chapter inform readers in a chronological way about several 'schools of translation' which have shaped the way translation theorists and practitioners have come to think about translation over the past decades. The translator is given an important new role of 'co-author' and here we see the affinity of this approach to the postmodern, post-structuralist ideas about translation discussed above. The usage-oriented approaches of discourse, pragmatic and functional analyses are particularly appropriate for translation. The historical roots of discourse analysis range from classical rhetoric, Russian formalism and French structuralism to semiotics. The strength of descriptive translation studies lies in an emphasis on solid empirical work, often in the form of detailed diachronic case studies and an insistence on fully contextualizing the texts both at the level of the reception situation and the receiving culture at large.
