The Pivotal Status of

the Translator's Habitus*

Daniel Simeoni
York University (Toronto)

Abstract: The paper explores the possibility of nudging theory away from the
properties of systemic constructs towards the main focus of translation norms,
i.e., the translator. The current model of DTS could be reframed, or 'translated'
in a topological sense, by giving it a slightly different slant on the assumption of
a translating habitus understood as: (culturally) pre-structured and structuring
agent mediating cultural artefacts in the course of transfer. A discussion of the
translator's endorsement of subservience is included, followed by a brief
genealogy of the concept of habitus. A prospectus for future research in product
analysis and the acquisition of translatorial competence is also sketched out.
Résumé: Le versant théorique de la traductologie descriptive met habituelle-
ment l'accent sur les fonctions systémiques des grandes unités culturelles lors
des opérations de transfert. Mais qu'advient-il lorsque l'angle d'observation
resitue l'agent porteur de ces opérations, le traducteur, au centre du processus
de transformation? Les dimensions à la fois structurées et structurantes de
l'habitus du traducteur, l'allégeance assumée par ce dernier au regard des
autorités établies, les conséquences d'un tel recadrage tant pour l'analyse
comparative que pour les processus d'acquisition sont ici tour à tour abordées.
L'ébauche d'une généalogie conceptuelle de la notion d'habitus complète cette
contribution.

The object I am concerned with in this paper is the ability to perform

translation in acceptable ways. Specifically, I am in search of an improved
conceptualization to help account for:
(a) the myriad determining choices made by translators in the course
of translating;
(b) why it is that, as we register intuitively when reading them, transla-
tors' styles differ consistently from one another (and from the
authors', whose voices they report);

Target 10:1 (1998), 1-39. DOI 10.1075/target.l0.1.02sim

ISSN 0924-1884 / E-ISSN 1569-9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 DANIEL SIMEONI

(c) ultimately, the dynamics of the complex of inner/outer forces that

coheres in the course of apprenticeship, to shape the style and
overall skills of a single translator.
In other words: What drives the translator's decisions in practice, and how
can this be?

1. Background: Cognition in Practice

Translating being an expertise whose enactment always occurs for particular

reasons in a particular context, it is worth inquiring into the acquisition of a
translator's style and skills in terms of their complex cognitive development.
This raises of course the issue of the angle from which to study this cognitive
emergence.
In the human sciences today, the global idea of cognition tends to be
implemented from two such angles, each with its own set of preconceptions.
One group of practices coheres around what could be called: the biological
view of the mind. Its two offshoots are in (i) neurology; (ii) experimental
psychology. Another perspective, equally founded in theory, is that of the
'cultural mind'. To quote the developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner
(1990: 12) quoting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: "There is no such thing
as human nature independent of culture". While it is plausible to project those
two orientations as a possible two-pronged strategy for Translation Studies —
provided minimal conditions of cooperation are met and each side is mindful
of the other's progress — I would still argue for the precedence of culturalist
studies over biologically inspired mentalist work. This formulation may be
seen to come close in spirit to Gideon Toury's otherwise more categorical
stance, from the perspective of a function-oriented Descriptive Translation
Studies:
there is little point in a process-oriented study of whatever type, unless the
cultural-semiotic conditions under which it occurs are incorporated into it.
(Toury 1995: 13)

To engage in a more refined conceptualization of the cognitive tasks of the

translator from a cultural perspective is not a value-free decision at a time
when substantial resources are being made available for the more applied
branches of inquiry, based on methodologies and models that may not be the
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 3

best suited, given the inherent unreductibility of their object. For reasons still
partly unclear, whole sectors of the research community seem to have closed
their eyes lately on the socio-symbolic, representational and interactive reali-
ties of cognition in the wider world of practice. The focus is now instead on
the black box of cognition, the wiring that permits the transmission of infor-
mation in real time, across cultural perspectives, across socio-economic
divides, across historical periods. Most of what goes on under the heading of
cognitive science today rests on the strong hypothesis that the inner workings
of the mind of Homo sapiens can be studied independently of its socio-
cultural environment. Inevitably, in the process, the surrounding context is
being whittled away, reduced under experimental conditions to the status of
controlled variables, or more vexatiously still, lamented as sheer 'noise',
acknowledged by default, then swept away from the analytical frame,
caeteris paribus. The problem with this approach is that many of the determi-
nants of cognition-in-practice are ignored, that could profitably reorient re-
search towards more realistic — and not necessarily humbler — goals.
The background position taken in this paper is that if such a finding as a
translatorial mind (or mindset) is to be identified, it should draw its evidence
first and foremost from the variety of settings in which the task is, and has
been, performed. Most importantly, we should avoid conflating the notion of
translation as enforced practice — which is what all preserved fossils of
attested translation for the last five thousand years have amounted to — with
the dubious presupposition of a pure, specific faculty of translating, unsullied
by the circumstances under which it operates.
It is also hoped, through this effort, that Translation Studies may contrib-
ute an improved understanding of the continuum of research linking
psychosocial inquiry to hermeneutic investigation, and clarify the relation of
theory to practice.

2. A Behaviourist Model of Skill Acquisition

The recently published Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond by

Gideon Toury (henceforth abbreviated as DTS & beyond) is an ambitious,
wide-ranging attempt to bring the focus of theory to bear on translating
practices. Although other scholars have entertained views that overlap with,
or complement his (some of them acknowledged in DTS & beyond), his work
4 DANIEL SIMEONI

is by far the most explicit defence and illustration of what can be called the
cultural approach to translation matters. Toury himself makes it clear in his
introduction that he sees his effort as an incentive for further discussion: "Far
from wishing to attain general agreement, my intention is to stir a debate" (p.
5). The following argument is intended to be one such contribution.
My starting point is the developmental model presented in the chapter
entitled: "Excursus C: The Making of a 'Native' Translator" (pp. 248-254).
Earlier in the book, Toury had signalled his intention to begin to tread a
domain of research still largely uncharted: "The process by which a bilingual
speaker may be said to gain recognition in his/her capacity as a translator has
hardly been studied so far" (p. 53). In Excursus C, described by its author
himself as "speculat[ive] at some length", "the emergence [of translating] as a
skill" (p. 248) is seen as building and "qualitatively" expanding on a "predis-
position" that is claimed to be "part and parcel of mankind's basic linguistic
equipment" (p. 245; the latter quotation is from Wilss 1982).
Given the richness of the semiotic substratum out of which DTS devel-
oped and also the potential of his model to embrace larger anthropological
and sociological concerns, it is not entirely clear why Toury opted for such a
strict behaviourist perspective on acquisition. It is probably this contrast
between the main argument of DTS and the way developmental processes are
presented in this chapter — a contrast still underscored by the author's
reservations vis-à-vis what is presented as an excursus only — that impelled
me to try and reframe or 'translate' (in a topological sense) the model, giving
it a slightly different slant on the assumption of a specific translating habitus
(how specific being of course the issue). Although the assumption points up in
many places here and there in the book, it is neither fully spelled out nor
developed.
I have suggested elsewhere (Simeoni 1997) that Toury's model of DTS,
while elaborating on Holmes's 1972 visionary map of the field of Translation
Studies, also brought considerable revisions to the original landscape.
Holmes's conceptualization itemized the various branches of the future disci-
pline as equal partners in a common venture. Toury's original blend of
Jakobsonian structuralism and classic empirism raised function-oriented re-
search to pivotal status, a higher node in the tree of knowledge constitutive of
the discipline. In the new scheme, function-oriented research not only domi-
nates product- and process-oriented inquiry; it also governs the applied and
theoretical branches. In a topological sense then, Toury's reading is already a
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 5

subversive translation of Holmes's original cast which goes a long way

towards implementing the vision peripherally projected by Holmes in the
same article (1988: 72), of a "socio-translation studies". The question is, can
DTS sustain yet another subversive manipulation, on the way to this desirable
goal?
In my reading of the tentative model described in DTS & beyond, trans-
lator interaction with the "environment" (p. 248) takes the shape of a series of
incremental stages, starting with initiation and ending up with recognition by
peers and others of his/her full-fledged competence (pp. 249ff.). Thus do
learners become trained, step by step, in the skills of the profession. We are
led to visualize a slow process of inculcation, emphasizing the translator's
gradual relief from the shackles of external pressures as s/he internalizes
normative behaviour ever more deeply in his or her practice. This interplay of
constraints on the activity of translating is valuable, for it gives us a sense of
the kind of limitations to be expected from a purely mentalistic approach to
translating. Those constraints are of course social ("environmental circum-
stances" in Toury's words, p. 246). Only by becoming internalized do they
give an impression of being part of the mental apparatus of the translator. The
surface manifestations that we study as translation scholars — translations as
end-results of constraining processes — are typically entwined, both mental
and social products.
Interestingly, the constraints identified and operationalized by Toury for
the special case of translation are also those mentioned by Norbert Elias in his
sociological approach to "the problems of humanity, and accordingly to the
problem of civilization" at the basis of his influential theory of Civilizing
processes (Elias 1996: 32-33). Except for the (biological) "constraints im-
posed on people by the characteristics of their animal nature" and those
entailed by the natural environment ("non-human natural circumstances"),
Elias saw two major types of constraints to which all humans are exposed:
"constraints by other people" which he calls "Fremdzwänge", and "self-
constraints . . . actualized [on the basis of our biological makeup but distinct
from them since they are conveyed to us] through learning and experience".
These self-constraints he refers to as "Selbstzwänge", noting further that
"patterns of self-constraints which develop as a result of differing experi-
ences are highly dissimilar". Elias had in mind macro-influences of the kind
people brought up and educated in different nation-states ("state-societies" in
his words) inherit and internalize as a matter of routine socialization. On that
6 DANIEL SIMEONI

construct, he defended the thesis that the general trend of "Civilization", with
occasional relapses, tends towards more Selbstzwänge and relatively fewer
overt Fremdzwange. This developmental view, with all due caution of course,
could be termed phylo-sociogenetic.
In Toury's model of translator skill acquisition, micro-processes reveal a
more definite pattern yet. The emergence of acceptable behaviour by a single
translator having internalized the skills is said to be subordinate, to some extent
even proportionate, to the sloughing off of external constraints. Successful
acquisition of skills supposes an alchemy of sorts. Onto-sociogenetically, much
of what happens cognitively in the course of translatorial training is encapsu-
lated in this basic, far-reaching transfer: Gradually, Fremdzwange transmute
into Selbstzwànge.
Toury is adamant that the horizon of the successful translator heralds
near-complete submission to the norms effective in the subsector(s) of society
in which s/he is professionally active. For an extreme yet representative
example of this projected servitude, we can turn to the conclusion of the
chapter dealing with Hayyim N. Bialik's translation of Tom Freud's version
of a Schlaraffenland tale for children (previously analysed by Toury in 1992):
Of course, a translator may decide to work against the order offered him/her
by the target literary-cultural constellation . . . [but] What is most signifi-
cant in the present case is the fact that even a poet-translator of Bialik's
calibre, who was at that time at the peak of his fame and influence, hence in
a good position to introduce changes of norms, opted for adhering to them,
and rather devoutly at that. (pp. 163-164)

This principle of rigorous subjection to norms has been validated. It has been
observed that a translator's style and performance tend to be new more on
account of their novel combination of competing norms (whose explication it
is the translation scholar's responsibility to bring to light), than as a result of
genuine 'creation'. And even that is the exception. Norms have the upper
hand. Translators adhere to them more often than not. They may not like this,
and may often wish they could distance themselves more from them, but they
recognize their power. However, since the process is very much the same in
all sectors of society governed by norms, i.e. pretty much everywhere, the
question of the agency behind norms in general and behind translational
norms in particular, begs for an answer.
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 7

3. Revisiting the Power of Norms on Translators: Endorsing

Subservience

What are the forces that make norms such powerful instruments of control as
to have all agents, including those in a good position to change them, conform
to their diktat? And if the (systemic) subsectors always prevail, what does this
say of those who, faced with a plurality of possible decisions in the real time
of practice, nearly always opt to go along with existing norms? Are translators
just plain submissive?
One hypothesis is that translatorial competence may be characterized by
conformity to a greater extent than is the competence of other agents active in
the cultural field. The reasons for such a specificity can only be speculated on,
but taken together, they contribute to a positive argument: Translators, not
unlike the scribes of ancient or premodern civilizations, have always occu-
pied subservient positions among the dominant professions of the cultural
sphere. In a folklore of translation whose reasoned history should be written
about, anecdotes real or apocryphal abound, of the translator's committing
mistakes, misunderstanding obvious references, altering the 'true' meaning
willed by the author. More often than not, those stories end with a joke, or a
jab, at the translator's expense. This lower status has been acknowledged in
writing and translators fully assume it. Because this issue of translatorial
subservience continues to be a matter of dispute, it may be worthwhile to
devote some more space to this section.
In a recent contribution to Target, Marja Jänis (1996) observed that, to
the question she put to eighteen translators specializing in the theatre as to
whether they had a sense of being "the servant(s) of two masters — the
playwright, and the performing group and the audience? One more than the
other?", only one "refused to be anybody's servant and called himself an
acting playwright". It is worth recalling the exact terms of the findings, as
presented by Jänis (Section 6):
The vast majority considered themselves to be the servants of the play-
wright. Some used expressions such as interpreter, deputy or surrogate
for the playwright. Only four translators considered serving those producing
the actual performance and only two thought of themselves as servants of
the theatregoers. The idea of a translator whose work should preferably be
forgotten but who is responsible to the playwright for correctly rendering
the play into another language seems to prevail as the ideal of a good
translator:
8" DANIEL SIMEONI

the translator is the only one who can insure that the playwright's
text and its main ideas are rendered into another language. The
morality of the translator requires his or her standing at the side of
the playwright. (Jänis 1996: 352)
At what I take to be the opposite pole, the single dissenter expressed the
following opinion:
I have decided to act the role of the playwright when I am translating, but it
does not mean that I can do whatever I want to the play. It means that my
personality is divided into the ideal self, which is the playwright, and my
own self, which is the worse part, a kind of a scribe. OK. (Jänis 1996: 353)
The point here is threefold: (i) the structure of the questionnaire used by Jänis
had been adapted "from a method developed . . . for interviewing Finnish
writers", (ii) the working metaphor of the 'translator-as-servant' came natu-
rally to the mind of the scholar in search of what went on in the minds of
specialized translators, (iii) the trope was instantly familiar to the informants
who all recognized it as a valid interpretation of their work, but one. In other
words, the notion of translator's subservience (and by implication that of its
reversed figure, creativity) was set up spontaneously in terms of how it
compares to authorship, with 94.4% of the respondents agreeing to the
presupposition as far as their own experience was concerned. This, to me,
sounds like a powerful argument in favour of taking this belief in subservi-
ence seriously; so much so in fact, that, as long as the finding has not been
invalidated in a replicate experiment, further conceptual re-elaboration
should incorporate it as the default attitude of translators working in compa-
rable circumstances. It would be most interesting to set up a comparative
questionnaire and administer it to translators across cultures, to see whether
we can interpret the range of responses in light of what is known of the
socioprofessional itineraries of the interviewees. After all, this attitude of
assumed subservience is not innate. It must have a history, both individual and
at group level. It is remarkable that, in a highly publicized gesture of a past
much too recurrent not to be viewed as an obligatory presentation rule,
prominent translators have just as readily claimed to be the servants of a
higher function or of another agent (usually the author), invariably better
placed or positioned in the social sphere, to whom they claimed deference.
In a twist of fortunes related to wider organizational changes, the same
practice can be observed today, within the ranks of professional translators
and their organizations, this time in references ad nauseam to the authority of
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 9

the 'client'. The common translator at the end of the twentieth century thus
behaves vis-à-vis his or her client (therefore vis-à-vis the whole structure of
society) in the same way that authors, beginning with early grammarians in
modern times (see e.g., Illich and Sanders 1988; Trudeau 1992), used to
behave with respect to the monarchs who commissioned their work. Those
earlier periods of enforced submission culminated in the more advanced
nations of Europe in what came to be known in later traditions as El siglo de
oro, le Grand Siècle, The Age of Dry den,1 etc., unfailingly giving rise to the
most stringent sets of conventional rules, so imperious for the aspiring writer
of the day that the only space left for creativity lay in the "arrangement of
words" within. For everything else s/he depended on a matrix of thoughts
whose norms were as imperative and codified as those of a courtly game.
Disregarding the rules amounted to being disqualified, ridiculed, ignored,
ostracized, sent to jail, or worse. Writing in 1660, Blaise Pascal was able
prophetically to distance himself from this dictatorship of normative prac-
tices, reading subversively into them a space where another kind of author-
ship would eventually develop and flourish:
Qu'on ne me dise pas que je n'ai rien dit de nouveau: la disposition des
matières est nouvelle; quand on joue à la paume, c'est une même balle dont
joue l'un et l'autre, mais l'un la place mieux.
J'aimerais autant qu'on me dît que je me suis servi des mots anciens.
Et comme si les mêmes pensées ne formaient pas un autre corps de discours,
par une disposition différente, aussi bien que les mêmes mots forment
d'autres pensées par leur différente disposition! (Pensées, I, 22)

"Placer sa balle", such was the secret of creative writing, style and persuasive
rhetoric alike, under the Ancien Régime and later. Clearly, only those writers
whose training was proper — that is to say, only those whose acquaintance
with the subtleties of Court culture had been prolonged enough to make them
familiar with the practice — to the extent that it became a second nature —
had a chance of making themselves heard. As to the substance or themes
debated, it was no more the writer's prerogative to choose them, than it is in
the translator's power today to knowingly invent new meaning.
A closer consideration of Dryden's rhetoric in a selection of texts he
devoted to translation (Schulte and Biguenet 1992) can give us a better idea of
how such constraints were the result of an internalization of beliefs, histori-
cally enforced. In his famed, ideologically charged Prefaces to Ovid's
Epistles and to Sylvae, and even as late as 1697 in his dedication to the Aeneis,
10 DANIEL SIMEONI

Dryden — like a late Malherbe wrapping up conclusions from a century of

intense debates on the nature of 'good' writing and translating (the great age
of translations and travel books in England was the early seventeenth century)
— comes close to defining translation as an esoteric art. He who was called
"the lawgiver to translation" (T.R. Steiner 1975: 1) dedicates far more space
to what translation should NOT be than to any practical rules helpful to the
apprentice and thus, subjects the craft and its practitioners to the most extreme
form of censure: the censorship of legitimate usage. This is not the place for a
linguistic analysis of those seminal texts. I shall simply observe, after George
Steiner (1978: 253), that the common middle-class belief in the virtues of the
golden mean, avoiding both excess and defect, so characteristic of that period
after years of internal strife and class warfare and the restoration of the
established order, is well mirrored in Dryden's prose — both in the intricate
balancing of its internal period (clauses punctuated by "not", "but", "how-
ever", "neither" and the like, surge up in tight clusters) and in the core
message delivered to the profession: Translation ought to be "not so strait as
metaphrase, not so loose as paraphrase". The translator should above every-
thing else "see fit to steer between the two extremes of paraphrase and literal
translation". Moderation was the motto, in this as other works of imagination.
Coming from so towering a figure as Dryden in the late seventeenth
century — retained writer under contract for the King's theatre, poet laureate
and historiographer royal, hereditary Puritan turned Anglican before convert-
ing to Roman Catholicism on the accession of James II in 1685 — the advice
was not gratuitous. There is an exemplary side to those Prefaces in which
translators of the 1680s are informed of the best, cautious way of performing
their art, by a poet and playwright reputed to have lived in the house of his
publisher, Herringman, until 1679, making himself known to the literary
world on writing Heroic Stanzas (1659) to the memory of the late Protector,
Oliver Cromwell, then hailing the new order with a Panegyric on the Restora-
tion (1661).2 Such a piling up of otherwise competing authorities — political
patronage, publishing, the two major literary genres — were inscribed in the
name "Dryden", and later into the new regime, when he ventured once more,
in The Life of Lucian, "to say a word of two about translation in general". The
subservience of the translating genre and of its practitioners seemed complete
then.
There is a risk of misreading this exemplariness, and I can only hope to
prevent this here with a digression. While in England the classical spirit of
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 11

'good translating' reflected a middle-of-the-road policy of the neither-nor

persuasion, French absolutism resulted in a very different kind of classicism,
espousing the rules generated and dictated at the Court as part of the linguistic
etiquette. Two contemporary social orders were giving rise to a single
behavioural type, submissiveness, diversely instantiated in distinctly domi-
nant beliefs and practices. There seems to have been a complex co-occur-
rence of sorts: On the one hand, writing norms of two distinct, yet equally
coercive kinds, gave the literatures in both societies an appearance of strict
formality against which other literary movements subsequently rebelled. On
the other hand, this resulted in two distinctive beliefs in what 'good' translat-
ing was about: The apparently greater freedom or latitude cherished in France
in the wake of Perrot d'Ablancourt's decrees (see e.g. Mounin 1955, and
especially Zuber 1968) was squarely rejected in England (and later, in less
self-consciously absolutist countries) as gross "paraphrase", in favour of a
supposedly more balanced, well-tempered approach. But the key to the
irresolution lies elsewhere: Both the apparent freedom of French translators
and the balanced views praised by Dryden were so only in relation to the
source, attesting on the other hand to constraints of the most severe kind
relative to the target systems incorporated in the translator's competence.
Strikingly, while the whole of his 1680 Preface reads as a variation on the
theme of "servility" associated exclusively, in a trope promised to even
greater currency in later times, with literal translation, Dryden is entirely
oblivious to the fact that other more "elegant" prescriptions, such as that of
"mak[ing] Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he
had been born in England, and in this present age", are no less expressive of
the servile mode.
The claim is not so much that translators to this very day have been
factually dependent on patrons, protectors, clients and other fund-and-advice
providers in their creative activities. In this respect, translators are not unlike
authors until their nineteenth century emancipation in the wake of the various
movements of Enlightenment spreading through Europe or, for another anal-
ogy often echoed in the profession, actors lending their voices to 'roles'
designed and produced by others. What specificity would there be to
translatorial submissiveness if it amounted to a situation that every other
'profession' endures as a matter of routine? The issue is that, for historical
reasons that ought to be made clearer, translators seem to have been not only
dependent, but willing to assume their cultural and socio-economic depen-
12 DANIEL SIMEONI

dence — to the point that this secondariness has become part of the terms of
reference for the activity as such. To become a translator in the West today is
to agree to becoming nearly fully subservient: to the client, to the public, to
the author, to the text, to language itself or even, in certain situations of close
contact, to the culture or subculture within which the task is required to make
sense. Conflicts of authority cannot fail to arise between such masters but, in
the end, the higher bidder carries the day. The translator has become the
quintessential servant: efficient, punctual, hardworking, silent and yes, invis-
ible. Going back to Elias's sociogenetic scheme quoted earlier, it is possible
to imagine a history of translating and translators, tracing the meanders of this
slow mutation of forms: from a situation of overt coercion, initially imposed
from the outside because of the ways in which the politics of writing,
translating and literacy began to take form (the first patrons were the mon-
archs and protectors of the day; the first texts were religious or/and commer-
cial, potentially threatening the integrity of the power structure and therefore,
not to be tampered with; the politics of translation always came second to the
politics of writing, to issues of literacy, and to politics tout court), all the way
to the current state of things in which external pressures have been internal-
ized by the practitioner to such a degree that they have come to be seen as
desirable. The only space left for creativity and innovation is in the ways
chosen for achieving the goals of subservience (nothing to sneer at for sure,
but clearly a substitute for higher ambitions), the means selected and the
proper training for "la balle" to be best placed in a field consistently designed
for other purposes.
In this perspective, it is not so much the activity of translating, nor the
translator himself, nor objective norms as such, but the internalized position
of the translator in his field of practice which may turn out to be the single
most determining factor. For historical reasons turned structural, this position
has been consistently relegated backstage. Significantly, the more vocal calls
for translatorial emancipation have not originated in the ranks of translators as
such, but among peripheral observers. As we well know in our capacity of
teachers and researchers, not only many professional translators but quite a
few translation scholars qua translators continue to resist the suggestion that
the particular forms taken by the pressures and constraints exerted by the
client or the reader, let alone the language, are all relative, should be
historicized and crucially, are neither universal nor necessary. Such resis-
tance would hardly deserve mention, were it not that the beliefs supporting it
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 13

are easily converted into scientific claims to some kind of innate faculty of
translating accounting for the differences between those who can and those
who cannot.
This, overall, is an interesting configuration. While there is a risk that
translation scholars confuse their perspective with that of the translator, thus
advancing claims that are not borne out by the facts, it is also true that, with
the subfield fast expanding, and with practitioners taking heed of the work
done in graduate schools where most of the theoretical re-elaboration takes
place, actual translatorial behaviour cannot fail to be influenced in the long
run. The implied claim, in a longer perspective, is that this period may have
the potential of being analogous to the one which saw a projected emancipa-
tion of authors in the wake of the Enlightenment, except that the liberation
from the shackles of an imposed belief in the present configuration would
affect translators, not writers. We may suppose also that, just as the emancipa-
tion of writers originated out of the most hierarchically differentiated nation-
states of Europe, the fact that the current trend for resistive translation has
been generated in the United States is no coincidence. Here is a country which
arguably stands at the most coercive decision centre in terms of contractual
agreements, at the expense of all those who come later in the hierarchy of
editorial orders — including translators.
Two types of remarks conclude this no doubt too succinct section. They
both bear on the cognitive specificity of the putative translatorial competence
based on the acquired subservience of the profession, but they apply at
different levels.
• Unlike European writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
most translators currently practice their trade in highly differentiated
societies where clients, tasks and contracts tend to be widely contrasted.
Could the elusive faculty of translating today primarily be one of adjust-
ing to different types of norms, making the most of them under widely
varying circumstances (the image of Dryden serving different masters,
and advising translators to steer a middle course, would then be truly
emblematic)? Could the cognitive specificity of a translating faculty
therefore have less to do with language and verbalisation than with social
cognition and sensitivity, interaction with the outside world and beyond
that, perhaps, adaptive movement, or motor control?
• In a different order of concerns, could the increasing variety of tasks they
are being asked to perform (different clients and contracts, integrating
14 DANIEL SIMEONI

diverse computer skills, working increasingly in their second or even

third languages, sometimes stretching their expertise to the fuzzier do-
main of "information and consulting services") have alerted translators
to the relativity of the demands placed on them, thereby causing some
degree of cognitive dissonance in their historically imposed submissive-
ness, making them perhaps also more receptive to Translation Studies?
Could it be, circumstances permitting, that the mythical belief in pure,
untainted service will eventually prove more and more difficult to sus-
tain? Or, will that belief find yet another substitute? What then, would
become of the activity of translating?

4. Habitus-governed Acquisition:
A Theoretical Challenge for TS

Toury's version of so-called 'native' skills, coined to characterize the craft of

the translator, is clearly to be preferred to the notion of 'natural' translating as
put forward by Harris, and Harris and Sherwood in earlier times (see Toury
1995: 241-248). The process of "naturalisation" whereby a translator comes
in possession of those precious native skills amounts, indeed, to an internal-
ization of outer norms — or "socialization as concerns translating" (p. 250).
The problem is that socialization is no smooth process. In the first place, fields
are far from even. Considering only the simplest case, even when the social-
ized agent is envisioned in relation to a particular field of activity excluding
interferences from other parties or areas, skill acquisition requires no small
degree of symbolic and often socio-economic violence. As happens whenever
some special cultural capital is required for a task, some holders have an edge.
Such assets in the case of translators/interpreters are well-known: specialized
training in an adjacent field together with a fairly massive spread of general
culture — and also, most notably for conference interpreters, an acceptable
ethos in the eyes both of recruiters and delegates. It is useful in this sense to
take as a starting point the notion of a complex, adaptive habitus finely tuned
to the practical demands of the (special) field(s) in which it operates.
But there must be far more to translatorial habitus, not least because
most translating agents exert their activity in fields where their degree of
control is nil or negligible. The situation is not all that different from the one
of any other social agent, except that the scope is distinct, and the modalities
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 15

will need considerable refining if we want to go beyond the simple acknowl-

edgement of widely varying socio-historical implementations. Against this
backdrop, the question of "how a bilingual speaker emerges as a translator"
can be reframed as: How does one acquire, in practice and in principle, a
translator's habitus? In this discussion, I will proceed from the general to
the particular, taking the notion of habitus first as a maximally abstract figure
or type, encompassing a wide array of representations. Moving then into the
social arena, I will posit that the outcome of each evolving habitus takes the
form of particular aggregates of skills, each time unique and differentiated, as
a matter of course. Finally, I will speculate somewhat on the positive charac-
teristics of this translatorial habitus. In doing so, I will draw from several
authors whose work I found illuminating in conceptualizing the notion.
Aristotle, Elias already mentioned, Panofsky and, in greater detail, Bourdieu,
will be solicited. It should be clear from the start that the extensive borders of
the domain — no less than the quality of being a translator — literary,
technical, generic, specialized, etc. — preclude any serious substantiation
within the limits of this essay. A full development on the basis of the
principles sketched out will have to be a collective enterprise.

4.1. A Brief Conceptual Genealogy

The notion of habitus is anything but new. Aristotle (Categoriae 8) refers to it

as hexis, i.e., a quality of being or "disposition" characterized by stability and
permanence, as opposed to diathesis (changing disposition) and pathos
(simple accident). He cites two such "qualities" of hexis: the sciences, and
virtue (the latter specifically defined as hexis proairètikè, i.e., as "habitus
dependent on and creator of, choices"3 — thus clearly anticipating Bourdieu's
conceptualization). When conceived of as an attribute of human beings, hexis
is associated with age, character, social standing, distinction and birth
(Rhetorica II, 8, 1386a, 26). Most relevantly for students of language in
context, Aristotle establishes a strong association between (i) hexis as "those
dispositions only which determine the character of a man's life" and (ii)
stylistic variation. A person's hexis is said to be "reproduced" in his or her
style of speaking (Rhetorica III, 7, 1408a, 27-31).
By the time the term and its Latin translation reached us in the twentieth
century, they had lost their conceptual currency. This is why Panofsky, in
Section II of the 1948 Wimmer lecture known as Gothic Architecture and
16 DANIEL SIMEONI

Scholasticism, traced the genealogy of that "habit-forming force" (1964: 20)

back to Aquinas's "principium importans ordinem ad actum" (Summa
Theologiae I-II 49, 3c):'a "principle that regulates the act". His idea was to
deflect interpretations of what he saw as a strong "connection" (a "cause-and-
effect relation [that] comes about by diffusion rather than by direct impact")
between the type of vision of the world conveyed through Scholasticism, and
architectural practices in "the period from about 1130-1140 to about 1270 [in
the] 100-mile zone around Paris", as "mere parallelism", or as the result of
vague "influences" of the type that — he feared — would be implied in the
use of the "overworked cliché" of mental habit.
For his part, Elias resorted to the concept of habitus as early as 1939 to
epitomize the kind of generalized "embodied social learning" whereby "the
fortunes of a nation over the centuries become sedimented [in] its individual
members" (1996: 19). According to Elias, nations are carriers of a specific
cultural habitus which is transmitted to natives as a matter of routine yet
imperious socialization. Given the value of the concept to students of intercul-
tural transfer, it seems odd that the notion — which "was apparently used
quite commonly in German sociology between the wars" (Dunning and
Mennell 1996: 438) — was never applied rigorously to the field of interlin-
gual translation. Only in the larger context of literary studies has it been made
use of productively, using the network of related concepts of which it is part,
as e.g. by Rakefet Sheffy in her 1992 Ph.D. dissertation (see in particular part
IV, "The Concept of the Model in Cultural Analysis").
In its current form, the concept is described by Bourdieu, himself the
French translator and postface commentator of Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism, in 1967,4 as a "stenograph" for any "system of dispositions"
specific to (and active in) not only a nation-state but the "fields" within it.
When he first developed his own full version of the concept (1972: Part 2), he
was able to operationalize the notion of individual differentiation within a
single culture without jeopardizing the centrality of organized systemic prop-
erties — both in the society and in the field under scrutiny. John B. Thompson
(1991: 12) has proposed a synthetic translation of the concept:
The habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in
certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes
which are 'regular' without being consciously coordinated or governed by
any 'rule'. . . Dispositions are acquired through a gradual process of
inculcation in which early childhood experiences are particularly important.
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 17

Through a myriad of mundane processes of training and learning, such as

those involved in the inculcation of table manners . . . the individual
acquires a set of dispositions which literally mold the body and become
second nature. The dispositions produced thereby are also structured in the
sense that they unavoidably reflect the social conditions within which they
were acquired. (Cited in Gumperz and Levinson 1996: 405)

4.2. Bourdieu's Habitus: A Short Discussion

Although Bourdieu does not seem to have bothered presenting a synthetic

view of the different levels at which his notion of habitus is supposed to apply
(and perhaps this is a good measure of why, when all is said and done, his
work may turn out to be less that of a systemicist than of an empiricist or
fieldworker), it is quite possible to imagine an assemblage of sorts, like some
dynamic, unstable or staggering Turmbau, expressive of the interplay of the
multiple kinds of habitus — specific, cultural and economic, social and state-
national — explicitly subsumed under the same heading. (To this triad could
be appended an implicit consideration of the religious sources of modern
nation-states, à la Weber.) We should, above all, be wary of adopting the all-
too-simple image of Russian dolls or embedded influences, for the simple
reason that the facts appear far more complex. In particular, given the
interplay of influences to which we-as-social-agents are all subjected, it is far
from clear which kind(s) can be said to be the most active, which the most
tenuous, or which come first or last, in general terms.
Whatever else it may be, Bourdieu's concept of habitus is clearly a
collection of sorts, i.e. a convenient stenograph for different default functions
applying at different levels and in different domains. On the level of special-
ized fields, what the concept thus expresses stenographically could not be
more down to earth. It says: Don't even think of entering a field if your
habitus does not match the requirements. The more restricted the field, the
better attuned the habitus. The fields of mathematics and opera performance
are clear examples. Without the required capital, the notion does not even
make sense.
But the extension of the concept is such that it applies not only to the
state-national fields of cultural production or, for that matter, economic
production, but to the social environment at large and to the circumstances of
everyday consumption, lifestyles or preferences. In such an environment,
influences are so entangled on account of the fuzziness of field borders and
18 DANIEL SIMEONI

the relationships within, that the larger social constituency can hardly be
called a "field" or, at leasjt, it should be viewed as a much more complex and
messy system, where most participants are not even aware of the rules, or
worse, misread them as being similar to those in force in the specialized fields
in which, in the best of cases, they happen to be active professionally. The
overall effect is one of generalized misunderstanding or of partial understand-
ing. Illustrations are easy to find: Although nothing would seem to stop us
from buying newspapers, magazines or postcards at random, it is a fact that
we stay away from some of these items almost naturally, as it were, going
instead for ones better suited to our tastes. We do not really 'understand' how
such items can find buyers. Further, it is not true that our choices of habitat,
the neighbourhoods in which we elect to live, can be accounted for by
external socio-economic pressures only. If this were the case, only those
belonging to the upper upper crust would be content with their choices. Our
decisions in social life make sense for us alone, keeping us in a state of
ignorance as to what motivates others or better, convincing us that our choices
are the only valid ones, all others being either futile, distasteful or plain
wrong.
At the same time, it is easy to overstress this dimension of generalized
misunderstanding. For there is also a sense in which our habitus helps us
tolerate and process the uneven texture of the social fabric. Seen from a
slightly different angle, the cohesive force of the habitus is such that it helps
one make sense of otherwise unexplained similarities: the myriad determining
choices that we make in the course of our social lives tend to be consistent
and, together, define personal styles. Hence the continuity of speech styles,
thoughts and behaviour, instantly recognizable in intersubjective contacts.
Obviously, we are in a different order here than when we are dealing with a
special habitus (and therefore special capital). While we-as-social-agents are
all endowed with a social habitus, fewer of us are endowed with a specialized
professional habitus, and there are still fewer whose habitus mobilizes their
energies so as to make them active in a field constructed as an autonomous
entity. One way to understand such a model of society is to see it as an attempt
to construe the relations between the two types of habitus — restricted and
generalized, or special and social — within the context of the society at large,
in a reasoned manner.
Let us go back now to Aristotle's original insight that a person's hexis is
reproduced in his or her style. 'Style' can of course be understood
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 19

behaviourally, as a general way of being and behaving, but it can also be

restricted to its more common meaning: the art or skills of writing. Aristotle's
remark suggests that every literate person will write in a mode and manner
consistent with his or her habitus, understood, in Bourdieu's terms, as social
in its most general sense. We know of course that this is too tall an order. The
determinism is too strong. Bourdieu's work has dealt with writing, or more
exactly, with what could be called thinking-for-writing, at two distinct levels:
that of the restricted field of writers (novelists, poets, philosophers, etc.; see
e.g., Bourdieu 1991a and 1992) and, more peripherally, that of ordinary
practices (the focus here being rather on reading practices, shown for in-
stance in La distinction [Bourdieu 1979] to be in a relation of homology with
the other cultural practices generated in a single society). The relevant corre-
spondence then is not so much between the social habitus of a person and his
or her style of writing, as is sometimes misunderstood. Rather, it is a case of
mapping out, in the context of any special (e.g., literary) field, the differences
between the (literary, etc.) choices made by the various players on the one
hand, and then comparing them with the differences between their cultural
and socio-economic statuses in that field. In the more open context of literacy,
the challenge has been to show that there was a consistent correspondence
between the diversity of, for example, reading preferences, on the one hand,
and the differences in the socio-economic statuses of those involved. Maxi-
mally this would refer to the whole society, structurally (dis-)positioned.
Translating being a form of writing, we ought to be able to say on this
basis that becoming a translator is a matter of refining a social habitus into a
special habitus; on condition, that is, that the field of translation were con-
strued as a specialized field, in the same way that the literary field in
nineteenth century France could be read as a structured system in which the
participants knew of one another and occupied positions understandable in
terms of those occupied by their most direct competitors. Phrased in this way,
the differences between the two constructs strike one more forcefully than the
similarities. The pseudo- or would-be field of translation is much less orga-
nized than the literary field, its structuring being far more heteronomous for
reasons having much to do with the ingrained subservience of the translator
assumed in the previous sections. As long as this assumption holds, it will be
difficult to envisage actual products of translation as anything more than the
results of diversely distributed social habituses or, specific habituses gov-
erned by the rules pertaining to the field in which the translation takes place.
20 DANIEL SIMEONI

Not the field of translation, but that of heteronomous (literary, scientific,

technical, legal, etc.) production. Whatever special habitus can be deemed
relevant will have originated in a special field distinct from that which we-as-
scholars take to be the sphere of translation.

4.3. The Need for a Refined Conceptualization

The limits of Bourdieu's conceptualization of the habitus have been exactly

those of the borders of the nation-states or state-societies, wherein the
struggle for distinction in local fields applies, to the extent that everything
outside those fields can be made invisible. Those limits are negligible in most
studies undertaken within the framework of those countries having few
contacts with their neighbours or, at the other pole, former imperial countries,
if and only if their domestic scene alone is considered (traditionally, agents in
those countries have remained largely unconcerned with what was going on
outside). They are more of a problem in a context of rampant 'globalization'
where the circulation of products is unhampered by tariffs, and financial
markets dictate the behaviour of agents and institutions (see Simeoni, forth-
coming). To be precise, they have always been a problem whenever agents
were straddling different fields, either within a single culture,5 or even more
so, across cultures. This is clearly the rule in translation, despite the fact that
the default field whenever a decision has to be made must be the still
predominantly state-national section of the publishing sphere in which the
products of the translator's imagination are made to circulate. As soon as the
relevant practices — not only those of translators, but of editors, publishers,
and readers — are shaped significantly by cross-cultural habituses or else by
habituses trained not only away from the modal centre of the host culture but
even more radically, outside of that culture, what are the consequences? What
we have here, once such powerful notions as "field", "habitus" and "capital"
are plunged into the wider polysystem of world cultures, is an extremely
potent order of concepts which may account for phenomena long restricted to
the periphery, gradually becoming central. To cite but one direction of
research: We can perhaps better approach the reality of a country like India
today, where local writers produce their work directly in English, or even
translate their own works into English. Or the changes affecting formerly
autonomous countries in Europe.
This is not to say that Bourdieu has been oblivious to this scope limita-
tion. Richard Nice's Translator's Foreword to his Outline of a Theory of
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 21

Practice (1977), Bourdieu's own Preface to Anglo-American readers for

the English version of Distinction (1984; also 1991b, 1991c and 1994),
Wacquant's analysis of the inherent difficulty of conceptual transmigration
(1993), all such attempts at clarification and several more interspersed
in Bourdieu's teaching and research testify to an awareness that cultural
misperceptions are rife. Only the work has not been done theoretically, to
improve the state-national model (itself a considerable refinement of Elias's
own global, cultural model of a single dominant habitus characteristic of a
society-state) by taking into account the determinants of habituses external to
the field(s) in which those habituses are in use; in other words, those influ-
ences born away from the field under scrutiny and specifically, out of the
state-national sphere which alone gives social practices their current mean-
ing. These, I think, are sound principled reasons for introjecting into
Bourdieu's theory the question of the practice of translation, focusing on the
translator's habitus as a locus of tension revealing an extreme yet very
representative configuration of intercultural, as well as global influences.
Similarly, an approach such as the one developed by Toury in DTS & beyond
would gain from integrating the notion of habitus to its conceptual apparatus.
A programme of research which could be embarked on profitably in this
socio-translational framework is one that would investigate the extent to
which the stylistic decisions — lexical, rhetorical and matricial — made by
translators in their daily routines are a function of their personal habitus or —
more accurately according to the theory — whether the differential of stylistic
choices distinguishing different translators can be shown to be a function of
the differences in their specialized habitus. We may posit that late processes
of acquisition such as apply in the case of translating skills are elaborated
against highly specialized preferences consistent with the history or social
itinerary of the habitus carrier. The difficulties for implementing such a
programme of research should not be minimised, and I will say more on this
in Section 6, but first, the concept of translatorial habitus needs further
clarification insofar as it adds a novel dimension to function-oriented De-
scriptive Translation Studies.
Crucial to the understanding of the notion is the intriguing fact that the
habitus is both:
(a) "structured", i.e. the nexus of dispositions at any given time is given a
structure in the course of individual social lives; the habitus is acquired
and shaped, neither innate nor a haphazard construction. Toury says
22 DANIEL SIMEONI

something similar concerning translator's training and skill acquisition,

as well as the activity of translating itself: "the decisions made by an
individual translator . . . are far from erratic. Rather,. . ., they tend to be
highly patterned' (p. 147 — italics are in the original);
(b) a "structuring" mechanism, i.e. the bundle of dispositions thus acquired
contribute directly to the elaboration of norms and conventions, thereby
reinforcing their scope and power. As already noted by Aristotle, learn-
ing itself, through internalization, restricts the opening of new possibili-
ties or choices. Here again, Toury expresses a similar idea when he cites
the "relative one-sidedness" of the "environmental feedback" received
by trainees in specialized schools, due to the fact that "most of the
responding agents, and certainly all the ones that count, are teachers,
who, moreover, tend to adhere to a very similar set of norms" (p. 256).
He stops short however of attributing the same (relative) one-sidedness
to full-fledged practice, beyond the learning process: he does not address
the fact that once Fremdzwänge have been internalized, they remain
internalized as agentive structures. At the very least, they are extremely
resistant to change and, when change occurs, it is seldom willful. The
effective character of norm-induced decisions thus feeds upon itself even
as one ceases to be a trainee; hence e.g. Bialik's "devout" adherence to
pre-existing norms, a behaviour which, once the recursive character of
habituated practice is taken into account, becomes 'natural' — in the
sense used to describe second nature.
This is the point at which Toury's model, and with it, many other systemic
models of social behaviour, depart most clearly from Bourdieu's construal of
social meaning-making. Toury chooses not to assign the structured character
of practice to its simultaneously structuring power. Had he done so, he would
have elaborated a concept like that of habitus. Starting from a compatible
conceptual scheme, Even-Zohar recently came closer to the idea of a performa-
tive dualism inherent in the practice of cultural transfer, suggesting the
contiguous presence of two highly complementary principles: "organizedness"
and "organizingness". In his re-evaluation of the ways in which groups and
societies negotiate the import and transfer of "repertoires", the new emphasis
somehow seems less on the properties of systems as such, than on the passive-
agentive quality attached to agents and their social selves. In effect, Even-
Zohar stresses the need to pay "special attention to the activity of the makers
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 23

of repertoire who are at the same time agents of transfer" (1997: 362). Indeed,
this recursive structuring-structure pattern is quite intriguing, and remarkably
effective, for it contributes to the reinforcement of translator conservativeness
on both counts of outer pressure and inner persuasion.
Clearly there is servitude — subjection to norms — in the translator's
task but this servitude is not passive. Unwittingly, it takes the shape of
servitude volontaire playing naturally into the hands of custom and order. In
other words, we are responsible as translators for the conservative decisions
we make, not only because we wish to avoid "negative sanctions" (Toury
1995:163) but also because those choices are the ones we know and fully
assimilate during our training periods, and our practice, given also the rela-
tional character of our highly personalized backgrounds. Our trajectories in
the particular social space(s) in which we find ourselves active are guided by
models that we try more or less successfully, more or less consciously, to
emulate. Without this social impulse or libido for emulation, norms would
lose much of their strength. It is quite revealing that the same behaviour, seen
from the perspective of a literary critic obviously more familiar with the
ambivalence of writers vis-à-vis established models, is framed in less compli-
mentary terms:
the entire stream of assumptions that Western thought has devised to
describe the interlingual gesture of translation [rests on an] illusion that has
to do with a mystical, almost fanatic homage to norms and codes. (Norton
1984: 9)
Chesterman's recent proposal (1993) that translation norms be recategorized
into "professional norms" and "expectancy norms", the latter at a higher order
than the former since they "govern" all three components of norm-constitut-
ing behaviour — the "accountability" norm, the "communication" norm, and
consistency of the "relation" between source and target features — stresses
only peripherally the passive-agentive status (for his specific purposes: the
causal/teleological explanation) of the translator's gesture. And he does so
only at the level of professional norms: "Professional norms . . . are at least in
part validated by norm authorities. But they also constitute the actual practice
of competent professional translators" (p. 9). By contrast, expectancy norms
are seen as being largely beyond the translator's scope — "It is . . . in seeking
to meet the expectancy norms as adequately as possible that the translator de
facto conforms to professional norms (p. 10) — while I would suggest that
translators are also in the frontline in the perpetuation of those norms. Norms
24 DANIEL SIMEONI

do prevail, but translators govern norms as much as their behaviour is gov-

erned by them. This configuration in itself deserves closer study, for it may be
rooted in the complexities of human desire described by thinkers as different
as Spinoza and Nietzche. Bourdieu himself in a prologue to one of his books
(1989: 9) tellingly entitled "Structures sociales et structures mentales", has
referred explicitly to the notion of conatus to characterize the tendency
inherent in the habitus to "perpetuate its identity" (see also Bourdieu 1991b:
643). If we introject the concept of habitus in function-oriented Descriptive
Translation Studies, it becomes as legitimate to see the system actuated by the
overall structure, or by the agents themselves. Both play side by side, conspir-
ing vectors of human desire at individual and group levels. Thus is nullified
the question of whether we habitus carriers are free to act at will or, alterna-
tively, whether it is the society in which we are immersed that dictates the
agenda.
Social and specific habituses provide form and substance to what, in turn,
gives them substance and form: practical organizations of personalized skills,
presenting themselves casually as native aggregates of skills to be taken for
granted beyond the pale of rules and regulations. Hence the importance of the
concept for theories of social action, of which translation is an undeniable
part. The habitus is the true pivot around which systems of social order
revolve. Without it, abiding by norms would remain a feat of magic. Unless
one was prepared to believe in some conspiracy theory whereby, in each
social and/or professional group, a small circle of operators had a monopoly
of selecting and fine-tuning the norms effective in their sphere of activity.
However plausible it may be in some highly specific cases, this conception is
simply not applicable to all instances — definitely not in a field subject to so
many invasions and interferences from adjacent fields as that of translation.
Norms themselves are hardly straightforward, let alone single-purpose con-
structs. Their personal incorporation requires a complex mechanism of indi-
viduation whose workings can be metaphorized as an algorithm or as a
consistent 'interpreter'. A natural parser.
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 25

5. A More Flexible Model?

5.1. Pathways for Future Research

What are the implications of this postulated pervasiveness of habitus media-

tion, or Vermittlung in the epistemological sense that Cassirer (1964 [1923]:
6-7) gave to the term,6 for the tentative model of skill acquisition sketched in
Toury's Excursus C?
Primarily, we could accommodate less ordinary cases, even unattested
cases as long as they are possible cases. Among those attested, we may think
of those few budding translators who we know hardly need any training:
having long internalized a good deal of the norms effective in the profession,
they became endowed with the precious skills (or ethos) before even setting
out to apply for admission. With such choice candidates, no Fremdzwänge
need apply first. Outer pressures will be exerted after initiation, and at a
completely different level of expertise (as for e.g., higher productivity).
Secondly, the new focus may reorient research to a certain extent to-
wards the cultural group in which the translator acquired his training. Take for
example the recent experiment carried out by Janet Fraser, based on intro-
spection almost in real time by two groups of commercial versus community
translators who were asked to comment on their reactions to a text (1996: 91).
The experiment revealed "some fairly wide divergence of practice in the
strategies employed not only by the two groups of translators but also within
the group of community translators". Methodological treatises restrict their
scope to the usual dialectics of data and findings, leaving us wondering as to
the possible motivations for such behavioural differences. A habitus-based
explanation suggests that the acquisition of a "commercial" habitus overrode
(to a certain extent) the differences among the twenty-one professional par-
ticipants, while the same request for introspection by twelve community
translators, "translating from English into Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi,
Punjabi, Spanish and Urdu", could not fail to elicit widely different strategies
generated by their native cultural habitus. Such a finding, transplanted into a
wider interpretative frame, far exceeds the scope assigned to translation
analyses based on introspection, TAPs or, in the case of interpreting research,
pupillometric studies.
Thirdly, if what has been conjectured regarding the historically ingrained
subservience of translators — at least in Western tradition as documented —
26 DANIEL SIMEONI

can be validated by careful analyses into the sociogenesis of translating

practices, then the notion of a homogeneous field constructed in the act of
research, as the "literary field" was constructed by Bourdieu based on the
justified belief that its participants had become autonomous enough in the
nineteenth century to allow for structural interpretations within its own terms
of reference, becomes moot for translators. It does not invalidate the ap-
proach, however, suggesting instead that the tools be refined to fit the speci-
ficity of each operating field. Besides, an important preliminary finding could
be seen in the fact that it may be questionable in the present configuration, or
premature if one wants to be optimistic for the profession, to even conceive of
a distinct 'community' of translators. For the test of being part of such a
community is not only for the would-be participant to know how to "placer sa
balle". The real proof of belonging to the field is found when the relevant
decisions made by the stakeholders are taken with an eye on what their peers
are doing, either to go along with them, or to oppose them. As things stand,
only very restricted fields of this kind (usually identified by the presence of
literary retranslations, or polemical translations), fit the description. And even
then, the question must be asked, how dependent are such repositioning
attempts on the wider literary scene and on previous and current cultural
'groups' hosting the translators?
This is nicely documented, for example, in DTS & beyond (see in
particular p. 199, n. 4) regarding the contrast between Avraham Shlonsky's
Hamlet and S.H. Davidovitz's version published five years earlier.
Shlonsky's decisions were the result of a larger programme of which he was
no unwitting follower. Shlonsky's and Davidovitz's can just as well be
viewed as a contest of norms or practices, or as one shaped by and giving
shape to two distinct habituses, each trained within a specific socio-historical
context. The difference is simply one of angle. It seems to me that Toury
places the focus of relevance on the preeminence of what controls the agents'
behaviour — "translational norms". A habitus-governed account, by contrast,
emphasizes the extent to which translators themselves play a role in the
maintenance and perhaps the creation of norms. The same theoretical archi-
tecture yields two interpretations. Holmes's original map was neutral enough
in its expository style and Toury's focus on function structured it in such a
way as to allow more than one reading.
A whole new area of research, contrasting the specificities of what we
might call "authorial habitus" versus "translatorial habitus", is thereby open.
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 27

For a glimpse of what may be at stake, we could turn to Paul Valéry's moving
paragraph (1953) in which the poet-essayist, detached author par excellence,
discloses the fleeting urge he felt while translating Virgil's Eclogues, to alter
the original. He had felt the impulse, he said, on a few occasions, "for one or
two seconds of actual time", to correct the Latin of Virgil. It is all there: the
translator's historically imposed submissiveness (here transmitted to the posi-
tion of the translator in the twentieth century); the feel for emancipation that
only a translator qua author could experience; the associated gesture of
conscious suppression that would have been unthinkable in the seventeenth
century, when writers did not have the benefit of a century or so of self-willed
innovation.
Fourthly, this highly sensitive habitual configuration, always fluctuating
and in a state of perpetual repositioning (the unstable Turmbau that I have
been using as a metaphor for the complexity of social habituses, both on the
individual level and on that of society itself, will gain more currency as
detailed empirical studies are conducted), is even more of a productive tool. It
becomes possible to accommodate more 'data'. In particular, it can pave the
way for an account of one source of the tension experienced by translators in
their daily routines and as a result, offer an initial framework for a reasoned
explanation of the difficulty of the task at hand.7 The end of this section
speculates somewhat on this aspect of translating, relatively neglected in
translation theory.

5.2. The Difficulty of the Translator's Task: A Socio-Symbolic

Interpretation

Field structures in general, whether loose or rigid, complex or simple, gain in

comprehension as soon as they are perceived as felt structures. Structure as a
nexus of social norms is embodied and customarily somatized in daily rou-
tines. Try opposing a structure (external or internal); it will resist. This is what
makes the social world as experienced a vector of common violence either
suffered, accepted, channeled or under certain circumstances, obviously en-
joyed. In individual situations, an easing of the tension felt while translating
may be construed as evidence for a greater availability of internalized options
on the scale of one's native and acquired skills and a concomitant decrease in
felt pressure. An elevation of the tension on the other hand might be testimony
to stronger pressure to comply with external — i.e. not (yet?) internalized
28 DANIEL SIMEONI

norms — a situation accompanied by a feeling of relative unnaturalness. This

alternation of tension and relative ease is a common experience in translating,
as is the feeling of gradual easing as the task progresses — until it turns into a
new routine. The first pages are always the most hesitant, those where
predominant options must be defined, not unlike what Gabriel says of the act
of writing a novel:
Pues en el primer párrafo de una novela hay que definir todo: estructura,
tono, estilo, ritmo . . . Lo demás es el placer de escribir, el más íntimo y
solitario que pueda imaginarse, y si uno no se queda corrigiendo el libro por
el resto de la vida es porque el mismo rigor de fierro que hace faite para
empezarlo se impone para terminarlo. (Garcia Marquez 1992: 15)
The analogy may be even more valid than appears at first sight. The
often-heard complaints by translators that they do not have enough time to
perform their services satisfactorily suggest more than a concern with socio-
economic pressures. What is signalled in those laments is that there is some-
thing like a translatorial desire to spend more time polishing their work for
the sake of it, or for unknown, deeper reasons, circumstances permitting. Do
we know where this desire originates from? Is it less of a "predisposition"
than the linguistic faculty posited by most existing models? To what extent do
norms interfere with, or reinforce it? Could we interpret those complaints, in
the model we have begun to delineate here, as a muted reaction to the fact that
little or no space is being allotted to translators beyond the acceptance of
norms decided upon without their participation? Or, at other times, as signs of
frustration in the face of contradictory messages originating in the client's
order? What is sometimes perceived in the profession as "unprofessional", or
even as incompetence, might well be construed as a call for autonomy,
thwarted.
Too much routine of course is likely to reactivate the pain, as aptly noted
by Douglas Robinson (1991). An area of research in which psychologically
oriented experimentation might contribute a better understanding of the
translator's task, relates to the bodily inscription of many such routines. How
is it that we can experience pleasure in translating texts commonly described
as difficult? What does the repetitiveness of the task contribute to the feelings
in question?
This situation is reminiscent of what George Steiner says (1978: 44) is
the difficulty of understanding a poem — a situation, according to him, that is
but an extreme case of the common difficulty of understanding. Three of the
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 29

four levels of difficulty8 (contingent, modal, tactical), he adds, are to be found

in "any attempt made at translating". Only for the translator at work, the
difficulty is compounded by the task of cultural re-creation: it is not limited to
comprehension. The multi-level complexity of the task, and its intricate
structure too (mixing affects and cognition), require a powerful model of
comprehension surpassing the most inclusive linguistic theories to date. To
suggest that translating is complicated because "different languages have
conventionalized their imagery differently" (Tabakowska 1993: 77), consis-
tent as the statement is from a strict cognitive grammarian's viewpoint, may
be placing too much weight on language structures. Difficulty in translating is
not an absolute concept. If one wishes to adopt a cognitive grammarian
standpoint, then the task is difficult due to the varying degree of inculcation in
one translator's largely socio-culturally structured repertoire, of the particular
imagery attached to the native/working language that happens to be relevant
for a particular accomplishment. And if inculcation is the key notion, a
formalism designed to capture its workings should have at its center a subject-
grounded category. The habitus, again, fits the description.
If we assume, in an ideal-typical construction, that norms, external or
internalized, are qualitatively one and the same at the end of the process of
apprenticeship, then only their docile incorporation under specific circum-
stances is likely to make them easy to bear, giving the translators who carry
them a feeling of spontaneity that is in fact the product of a guided encounter
between a particular habitus and a specific context. Because the distribution
of spontaneity and conformity in the process of "guided meaning" making
(Halliday 1992: 15) is obviously unequal among translators and, even for a
single translator, in a state of constant flux depending on the task at hand, it is
unlikely that the pressures felt on account of their being recognized as
external can ever disappear.

6. Can an Alternative Developmental Model of Habitus-

governed Acquisition be Substantiated?

My goal in this paper has been to argue for conceptualization preceding any
kind of empirical work, not conceptualization per se. Evidently, the validity
of the suggested changes to the former framework will depend on whether it
can result in improved case studies or not. The fact that empirical intercultural
30 DANIEL SIMEONI

studies based on the type of conceptualization I propose require a great deal

of time, and are delicate to set up, is no reason not to perform them. There are
indeed limits beyond which the complexity of the nexus of relations is likely
to preclude rigorous practical implementation — at times, the blueprint may
be too complex. Referring to the social and philosophical homologies in an
entire field (specifically, the field of philosophers in Germany on the eve of
the Second World War), Bourdieu once remarked:
Devant l'ampleur de la tâche qu'elle assigne, on ne peut pas ne pas penser
que la méthode vaut mieux que l'application que l'on peut en faire, faute de
pouvoir maîtriser l'ensemble des savoirs (philosophiques, historiques, poli-
tiques, etc.) qui seraient indispensables pour lui donner toute la rigueur
nécessaire. (1988: 68, n. 3; emphasis added)

This important reservation notwithstanding, there is a rich corpus of scholarly

work which has made use of the notion of (authorial) habitus in a wide variety
of settings. Apart from Bourdieu himself (e.g., 1971; 1991a) and Sheffy's
1992 dissertation already mentioned, Charle (1979; 1990), Ponton (1977),
Viala (1984), Sapiro (1996) and even more aptly because of its cross-national
perspective, Charle (1995), have paved the way for future methodological
discussions. The focus in all those studies has been almost exclusively the
THEMATIC control mediated by socio-historically defined habituses. As it
were, STYLISTIC governance remains a largely uncharted domain. A func-
tion-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies, together with other more
hermeneutic insights, could provide guidance for future work into the socio-
stylistics of habitus-governed authoring and translating. In this section, I point
out a number of possible outlets for such research.
By virtue of its explanatory power, the concept of habitus is more than a
rhetorical sleight-of-hand. The social theory that supports it does not contra-
dict the DTS programme; rather, it complements it. It also points to other
ways of making sense of the nature and functions of the hypothetical faculty
of translating — other ways of setting up experiments. We needn't be hypno-
tized by experimental models to admit that whenever an uncanny relationship
of coherence shows up between preliminary and operational norms (Toury
1995: 58-61) — specifically between translational policy directives issued by
semi-official bodies and the matricial/text-linguistic practices of agents lo-
cated far off in the field, translatorial habitus mediation provides a practical
explanation for the (largely self-inflicted) coercion brought about by the
configuration of the field in which translation takes place — and in no small
amount also, by the structuration of adjacent fields.
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 31

It is theoretically possible for one translator's expertise to eventually lose

its deserved reputation and become less suited to the requirements of the field.
Translatorial habitus is a circumstantial byproduct, the result of years of
internalization, yet in practice never final — and it is not necessarily acquired
through schooling. The translator may tire and want to move to another field.
The field will also change under different circumstances. Current experi-
ments at social engineering — a process stenographed in the media as
"globalisation" — present those interested in the dynamics of habitus restruc-
turing with an interesting object. Changes affecting human cognition can be
observed and described almost in real time, taking place at an unusually fast
pace.
Modern sociographies of single translators' professional trajectories are
sorely lacking. The present void could be filled out by means of simple
interviews, without resorting to the heavy apparatus of sample-based tech-
niques: Biographical research is a legitimate area of social science whose
findings can also be solicited.9 We may find in the process that the skills
acquired under certain social circumstances undergo a reversal of fortunes
when those circumstances are altered, even without changing in content. The
slow devaluation in the Western world of the translator's precision skills, for
example (particularly blatant in heteronomous — or "peripheral" — sub-
fields), together with their fast replacement with another requirement — an
aptitude for rapid turnout — are not even considered. Another change that
needs documenting is the sudden valuation of automated skills such as
'product formatting' in a profession that used to be mostly concerned with
style. In all such examples, the practice would gain from being studied as a
result of changing habitus-governed dispositions. As hinted above (end of
Section 3), such changes point to increasing demands on a cognitive faculty
that is only marginally present in linguistic or even more generally language-
based models, i.e. the adaptive faculty (also signalled by Toury 1995: 233).
The same principle may serve to delimit the general corpus of Descrip-
tive Translation Studies. Not every translated text can be considered a pro-
ductive object of study at this early stage of development of the discipline.
The result will depend in large part on the amount of information likely to be
secured about single translators and their times. Accordingly, the importance
of the first act of research, that of framing, constructing and cutting out the
relevant context for a particular study, cannot be minimized. Generally speak-
ing, the decision carries with it the likelihood that we may (or may not) be
32 DANIEL SIMEONI

able to answer such critical questions as, e.g.: Who were the translators of
philosophical treatises in Germany between the World Wars? Of children's
literature in the US? Of recipes in Spain today? etc. Who here refers to such
questions as: Can we have access to their trajectories in acquisition? The
choice of an object of study is rendered more delicate in function-oriented
Descriptive Translation Studies because of the so-called historical invisibility
of translators, not to mention the fact (predictable in view of their arch-
dominated status) that their work, more than that of authors, has commonly
been tampered with — to the effect that many texts left to our appreciation are
in fact adulterated, with little hope for the analyst to disentangle the various
hands, minds and hearts responsible for the final product.10 For all these
reasons, contemporary sociotranslational studies of the type envisaged here
may yield new 'data' that historical research has been reluctant to pursue so
far.

7. Provisional Conclusions

The habitus of the translator is the elaborate result of a personalized social and
cultural history. No discriminating techniques exist yet which can abstract its
workings convincingly from data assembled experimentally. For future re-
search in mental processes underlying translation performance to be compat-
ible with this sociocognitive framework, new protocols may have to be
designed following prior observations in habitus-governed and governing
practices. A rudimentary object along those lines was pointed out in Section
5.2 in the form of structural "difficulty". The details of relevant studies must
of course be worked out.
Conceptualizing translation as the quintessential activity of a cultural
mind moulded by the social environment and incorporated in the translator's
act amounts to downplaying the specificity of the tasks involved — be they
linguistic, psychological, neurological or other — in recognition of their
(sociocognitive) complexity. This operation of despecification recalls the
higher-level recategorization performed in a semiotic framework by Even-
Zohar (1981). Such reconceptualizations are often met with denials when in
fact they are convenient ways of refraining an elusive object, impelled by the
need to preserve some degree of coherence for the model. The complexity of
the object is recognized, the scientificity of the approach strengthened, the
 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 33

(relative) indetermination of individual moves preserved. The simplicity of

the term should in no way suggest that the subsumed phenomena are simple or
uniform.
Bringing the translator's habitus center stage is of course tantamount to
giving the act of translating prominent status, as the main locus precipitating
mental, bodily, social and cultural forces. To talk of a habitus is to imagine a
theoretical stenograph for the integration and — in the best of cases — the
resolution of those conflicting forces. A highly personalized construct, it
retains all the characteristic imperiousness of norms. Indeed, norms without a
habitus to instantiate them make no more sense than a habitus without norms.
Incorporating conflict in one single construct attached to the person of the
translator should also help us better understand the tension behind the indi-
vidual choices during the decision process.
I see no principled contradiction between the preliminary views I have
attempted to articulate in this paper and the firmly established programme of
DTS. Neither Holmes's identification of the function-oriented component nor
its subsequent promotion to pivotal status by Toury are jeopardized by the
inclusion of the concept of habitus. The priority of the functional approach to
process and outcome is not in dispute either. Nor is the importance of norms
downplayed. The emphasis however is on the practices of translating and
authoring rather than on texts and polysystems; translatorial habitus rather than
translational norms. The overall architecture and (most crucially) its levels of
application, are unchanged. Only the focus has shifted, as in an Escher sketch.
It can shift back and forth depending on the goal pursued by the researcher.
The findings of the programme of research sketched in these pages
cannot be taken for granted. Adding a higher-order concept like that of
habitus to the DTS framework may contribute to revealing inconsistencies in
the model, or point to its limits. The reason is simple. A habitus-led reorgani-
zation of the facts of translation will force finer-grain analyses of the socio-
cognitive emergence of translating skills and their outcome, in particular at
the micro-level of stylistic variation. It is likely that norm-governed textual
relations will not be strictly validated all the way down to the lower levels of
observation: the propositional core in the clauses of the "reported" sequence
(Mossop 1983) and in more troubling fashion perhaps, the modalisation that
provides the sentence with its "soul" (Bally 1942. See also 1944: 36).
The challenge at the end of this programmatic discussion is daunting, yet
I do not see how it could be evaded: Can a common terrain for Translation
34 DANIEL SIMEONI

Studies be worked out — one which would articulate the findings of the
culturalist school with the more hermeneutic insights that have not ceased to
accompany the practice of translation since its inception? Barbara Folkart's
work (see in particular 1991: 366-398) has pointed to a direction along these
lines. On the assumption that higher-level cognitive tasks tend to be loosely
structured, the mediating models designed to illuminate translatorial perfor-
mance should take this inherent looseness (or fuzziness?) seriously. This is an
arduous path — for it is far more habitual for the theoretical mind to look for
degrees of explicitness exceeding those in the reality of practice. The study of
habitus-mediated relations of norms to agents will be best served if we keep in
mind that only the weaker form of determinism can apply, in practice as well
as in our competing comprehensions of such practices in the act of research.
Even then, a sociocognitive approach to cultural process and outcome can
only increase our knowledge of the extent to which norms apply, in transla-
tion as in other intercultural modes.

Author's address:
Daniel Simeoni • 76 Earl Grey Road • TORONTO, Ontario M4J 3L5 • Canada

Notes

* This article has been far too long in the making. It has benefited from lessons, remarks
and contributions whose authors are far too numerous to cite. Two sources must be
mentioned however, without which the result would have been very different: my
students in the M.A. course of "Traductologie" at York University, practising translators
whose pointed remarks forced me to refine an idea that first began to coalesce in 1991.I
also wish to thank the editors of Target and two anonymous reviewers who commented
incisively on an earlier version of the paper, both substantially and on points of detail.

1. This is of course an allusion to Richard Garnett's influential book, written in 1895 and
consistently reprinted ever since. It was still on my list of readings in English literary
history when I was a student back in the 1960s.
2. As late as 1688, Dryden wrote a poem in honor of the birth of James II's heir, entitled
"Britannia Rediviva". At that time however, he seemed to have erred both in timing and in
accepting the commission, writing the piece only a few weeks before the so-called
English Revolution, when James was forced to flee England and William of Orange called
from Holland to take over the throne. This misreading of authority led to his discharge
(and the abrupt loss of his pension) as laureate and historiographer to the king.

3. The gloss is by Castoriadis (1990: 221).

 THE PIVOTAL STATUS OF THE TRANSLATOR'S HABITUS 35

4. It is worth noting that the French version of Panofsky's lecture includes a naming of
sections absent from the original publication in English. Thus, what was simply noted by
the author in the body of Section II as a "habit-forming force" for the purposes of his main
argument on scholastic architecture became the head of chapter 2 in the French transla-
tion. This apparently superficial editorial move (which we may only speculate was made
on the translator's initiative — both Bourdieu and the editor, J. Lindon, ought to be
consulted about it) had non-trivial consequences: reading a book chapter in which the
habitus of the agents was raised to prominent status could not fail to have an effect on the
ways in which the reader interpreted Panofsky's intent. This reading in turn helped
reinforce Bourdieu's own interpretive stance, further supported by an extensive postface.
To subsume this and similar shifts under the general heading of "strategies of
explicitation" may be a little too non-committal. What is involved here is more than
clarification; it is possible to view this as part of an outright strategy of persuasion, a
rhetoric of involvement more or less licit in different national cultures or subcultures
active in the publishing sector at different periods and in different environments, depend-
ing on the translator's margin of influence — here drawing his authority from the
adjacent field in which he was involved.

5. This interpenetration was aptly noted by Gisèle Sapiro in a recent issue of Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales (1996): no specific field can be said to be really
autonomous in the final analysis, since all fields are subject to the circumstances of the
larger social scene.
6. ". . . alle Objektivierung, die sie [Wissenschaft] zu vollziehen vermag, in Wahrheit
Vermittlung ist und Vermittlung bleiben muss . . . Selbst innerhalb des Umkreises der
"Natur", fällt sodann der physikalische Gegenstand nicht schlechthin mit dem chemi-
schen, der chemische nicht schlechthin mit dem biologischen zusammen — weil die
physikalische, die chemische, die biologische Erkenntnis je einen besonderen Gesichts-
punkt der Fragestellung in sich schliessen und die Erscheinungen gemäss diesem Ge-
sichtspunkt einer spezifischen Deutung und Formung unterwerfen".
7. On this point my interpretation of the translator's developmental model of skill acquisi-
tion departs from that of Norbert Elias applied to social groups. Elias {op. cit.) sees
greater "difficulty" when constraints are no longer imposed externally. In support of this
interpretation, he cites the examples of political regimes under which formerly coercive
demands have become internalized, and the evolving relationships between sexes in the
twentieth century. To a certain extent, the case of the habituated translator raises the issue
of the distribution of ease and difficulty (what has become second nature and what has
not).
8. The four types of "difficulty" are glossed by George Steiner: Contingent difficulties —
"statistically, by far the most compendious class" — refer pragmatically to everything
that "has to be looked up"; Modal difficulties "lie with the beholder", due to the latter's
estrangement from the times and circumstances under which the poem was composed:
their "rhetorical acrobatics" remain unsuspected ("a closed book") or are the precinct of
the specialist ("the terrain of academic research"); Tactical difficulties have their source
in "the writer's will" or his/her being "compelled towards obliquity and cloture by
political circumstances". Type 4, labelled by Steiner Ontological difficulties, stands in a
certain sense in contradistinction to the principle of elucidation attached to the practice
and teaching of translation: those difficulties refer to today's normative desideratum of
36 DANIEL SIMEONI

using a non-transparent form to resolve "the crises of idiom and values in the entirety of
modern Western culture". In this sense, the more recent feminist, post-colonial and/or
embodied approaches to translation also carry an ontological dimension, reflecting both
postmodern uncertainty and a subversive desire for reconstruction that would be quite
hard to make sense of, if one chose to ignore the twentieth-century legitimation of
barbarism alluded to by Steiner in these pages. Clearly, this dimension of valued obscu-
rity is totally banned from the translator's kit of skills.
9. An extensive bibliography (57 pages) can be found in the special issue of Current
Sociology (Simeoni and Diani 1995).
10. Douglas Robinson's current book project {Translation in the Spirit: Translators, Chan-
nels, Crypts, and the Invisible Hand) also stresses this elusiveness surrounding the
translator's task, guided as the translation is in real practice by an indefinite number of
third parties. For this he borrows from Nozick's notion of "disaggregated" agency. One is
reminded here of a long tradition — Bakhtin's earlier analyses of heteroglossia come to
mind — but it is also worth noting, at a time when deep changes are taking place in the
academic landscape, that this emphasis on the diffuseness of the creative process, once
restricted to hermeneutically based research (see note 8 above), converges today with
findings in conventional research surveys. Karen Knorr-Cetina's recent empirical team-
work (1995) on the circumstances of authoring in scientific research as observed in
physics labs points to the very same notion of an elusive, composite epistemic subject,
resulting in the emergence of virtual authorship and/or collective constructionism — this
in the stronghold of the more 'objective' sciences as seen by survey-research-oriented
sociologists. See Also Roger Chartier's work on the "multiplicity of hands and minds"
behind the figure of the author, and his study of the historical "dematerialization" of the
Text in the Western tradition (e.g. 1997).

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