ABSTRACT
In her book Excitable Speech Judith Butler points out that, when a new baby comes into the world and the doctor who receives the child observes ‘It’s a girl’, that speech act effects a performative. Butler’s inquiry concerns the authority that lends speech acts their force. The one who speaks the performative does so by citing it, for it always predates the particular utterance. Translation takes place within an existing practice, reiterating and extending it. The most central and powerful tenet of descriptive translation studies has been that translation cannot be defined a priori, once and for all. The other major contribution of descriptivism, the contextualization of translation, follows from this. It involved a reorientation which brought first culture and then politics and power into the picture. The behaviourist and objectivist reflexes, the rush to immanent laws, and the old structuralist taxonomic and binary fury have come to look dated and discredited.
