Descriptive Translation Studies and Toury's Norms
Gideon Toury shifted translation studies away from prescription (what a translation ought to be) toward description (what translations in a given culture actually are). His central concept is the norm.
Three norm types
- Initial norm: does the translation prioritise the source culture (adequacy) or the target culture (acceptability)?
- Preliminary norms: which texts get translated at all, and from which intermediate languages?
- Operational norms: matricial (segmentation, omission, addition) and textual-linguistic (lexical and grammatical choices).
Why this matters for AI translation
Every prompt that says "translate this" embeds an answer to Toury's questions. Saying so explicitly (which framework, which register, which glossary) makes the norms visible and reproducible across chunks. That is the difference between drift and consistency at long-document scale.
Further reading: skopos, Venuti, glossary strategy.