Chesterman's Translation Norms and Memes
Andrew Chesterman applied memetics to translation studies. Translation ideas, he argued, propagate like memes; certain supermemes recur across centuries because they survive scrutiny.
Two norm types
- Expectancy norms: what target readers expect a translation to look like.
- Professional norms: what competent translators do (accountability, communication, relation norms).
Five supermemes
Chesterman named five: source-target, equivalence, untranslatability, free-vs-literal, and all-writing-is-translating. Each has survived because it captures something durable. A modern AI pipeline that ignores expectancy norms produces technically correct but tonally alien output; one that ignores professional norms produces output no human translator would sign their name to.
Further reading: Toury norms, register.