Translators and (their) norms: towards a Sociological construction of the Individual

Communication-oriented theories like Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies seek to take human agency into account. Yet there has been inadequate conceptualization of the relationships between translators and norms, between the individual and the collective, or between agency and structure. Human agents must still be accounted for not only as professionals but as socialized individuals. The study of plural and dynamic (intercultural) habituses may thus become a key concept for understanding intercultural relationships. It can reveal how intercultural actors interiorize the normative structures not only of the source and target fields, but also of their mutual intersections. The comparative study of two twentieth-century Belgian translators, Ernest Claes and Roger Kervyn, here shows how translatorship can be redefined in terms of habitus, as an individuation of collective normative schemes related to the translator’s personal history, to the collective histories of the target and source fields, and to the intersections between the cultures concerned.status: publishe