ABSTRACT
Numerous problems remain with Steiner's formulation. One is that, while he explicitly wants to make his fourfold movement an ideal model of every individual act of translation, he also wants to illustrate it with specific transla tions from the past - and in the course of illustrating the four moves he begins to treat them like stable categories for the classification of translations. Thus Luther's Bible and Vladimir Nabokov's Eugene Onegin are both classified as incorporative translations; this classification is both trivially accurate, in that all translations by definition incorporate for eign texts into a domestic context, and wildly problematic, in that Nabokov 's radical literal ism is far more aggressive towards English, the TL, than it is towards Russian, the SL. In that sense it might have been thought of as more like the move of trust - except that, as for Goethe, it is difficult for Steiner to explain just how trust can motivate a single translation without proceeding to the other three moves.
