The nature and role of norms in translation

Gideon Toury’s chapter, first published in 1978, distinguishes among various socio-cultural “norms” in the receiving situation which “constrain” the translator’s choices and strategies and delimit concepts of equivalence. Norms can be inferred through “shifts” that occur between the translation and the source text. Toury seeks to describe and explain the “acceptability” of the translated text, the ways in which various shifts constitute a type of equivalence that reflects receptor norms held by specific cultural constituencies at a certain historical moment.