ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with criticism levelled from outside the empirical/systemic paradigm. The main thrust of Anthony Pym’s critique of the notion of systems has been that systemic approaches remain “fundamentally unable to model social causation”. Pym’s own proposals to think in terms of intercultural regimes are fascinating in themselves but offer little obvious advantage over field or systems concepts, especially as he presents them as “own particular brand of system”. Postcolonial, cultural-materialist and gender-based approaches to translation possess a broader conceptual hinterland and have generated a large amount of interest, discussion and research. To the extent that both translation and its scholarly study are intertwined as cultural practices, Lawrence Venuti’s critique of descriptivism has some justification. Venuti’s eloquent appeal to translators to stand up and be counted with resistant translations implies a charge of timidity and complacency directed at descriptivism apparently reluctant to mount the barricades.
