ABSTRACT
James Holmes recognized the essay’s pioneering role when he had John McFarlane invited as a guest of honour to the 1976 Leuven conference which marked the beginning of the Manipulation group. It is a remarkable piece for its time. The essay Modes of Translation as a whole seeks to overturn many of the traditional assumptions the descriptive paradigm would also, and more forcefully, argue against. The framework proved compatible with what Holmes was doing and, with the polysystems idea. The place of translation in a given literature shows the same duality: translations constitute independent texts while simultaneously reproducing already existing foreign works. Holmes’s role in the emergence of translation studies as a scholarly discipline generally, and in the formation of the descriptive ‘disciplinary matrix’ in particular, is widely recognized. Holmes shares with Popovic the view of literary translation as meta-literature; the idea stems from Roland Barthes’ notion of metalaguage, that is, language which speaks about language.
