ABSTRACT
The 1950s onwards saw the emergence of detailed taxonomies of small linguistic changes (‘shifts’) in ST–TT pairs. Vinay and Darbelnet’s classic taxonomy continues to exert most influence today, and was useful in bringing to light a wide range of different translation techniques. However, like Catford, who in the 1960s applied a systematic contrastive linguistic approach to translation, theirs is a rather static model. Fuzziness of category boundaries is a problem, while other models have been proposed for non-European languages (e.g., Loh 1958). Stylistic analysis, and its link to the identity, intentions and ideology of the translator, have come to the fore in the ‘translatorial stylistics’ of the new millennium (Malmkjær 2003). Such studies have greatly benefited from the development of more sophisticated computer tools and a new corpus-based approach focused on finding regular patterns of translational behaviour.
Meanwhile, a different approach has been afforded by cognitive theorists, starting with the Paris School of the 1960s, and including Gutt (from relevance theory) and Bell (from psycholinguistics and systemic functional analysis).
Increasingly, research methods have used technological advances such as corpus-based analysis, think-aloud protocols, keystroke logging and eye-tracking, although methodological procedures remain to be standardized.
