Gideon Toury

Gideon Toury (Hebrew: גדעון טורי‎) (6 June 1942 – 4 October 2016[1]) was an Israeli translation scholar and professor of Poetics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Tel Aviv University, where he held the M. Bernstein Chair of Translation Theory. Gideon Toury was a pioneer of Descriptive Translation Studies.[2]

Gideon Toury
Born(1942-06-06)6 June 1942
Haifa, Israel
Died4 October 2016(2016-10-04) (aged 74)
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Tel Aviv
Academic work
School or traditionDescriptive Translation Studies
Notable worksDescriptive Translation Studies and Beyond
Notable ideasTranslation norms, Pseudo-translation

Biography

Gideon Toury was born in Haifa, the first child of the historian Jacob Toury (1915–2004) and his wife Eve.[3] He completed high school at the Reali School in Haifa in 1960. After high-school, he did his military service in the Nahal Brigade and the paratroopers and as part of his training was sent to a kibbutz, to help out with the farming.[4] He lived there for six years, and he ended up editing the kibbutz journal and organizing cultural events. This experience helped him obtaining a position in a children's journal, where he did his first translations, and later as the editor of the Hebrew version of Popular Photography.[5]

He graduated with honors in Hebrew language and Literature at Tel Aviv University in 1970, and completed a PhD Literary Theory at the same university in 1977 on the topic of Translational Norms and Literary Translation into Hebrew, 1930-1945. In 1980 he won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for his translation into Hebrew of C.S. Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.[6] He was the first chair professor in CETRA, the research program in Translation Studies created by Jose Lambert in 1989.[7] In 1999, he was awarded honorary membership of the UNESCO Chair of Translation Studies at Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia.[8] In 2000, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Middlesex University, London.

From 1970 to 1983, he worked with Benjamin Harshav, Itamar Even-Zohar and Menachem Perry in the journal Literature and in 1989 he founded Target, International Journal of Translation Studies and has been general editor since. He is also General Editor of the Benjamins Translation Library.[9] He was also a member of the boards of The Translator and the Translation Studies Abstracts until he was "unappointed" following the decision of Mona Baker to boycott Israeli academia.[10]

Research

His main research is on the theory of translation and descriptive translation studies, with emphasis on the history of the Hebrew translation of the Bible to the present.

According to Toury, there are prescriptive and descriptive studies. Prescriptive approaches aim to formulate rules that should be followed by anyone who produces a text of a given type. They are focused on finding the most optimal or correct solutions. Descriptive approaches are about looking into existing texts and describing the rules they seem to follow.

He came up with the term "translation norms", as hidden rules followed by the majority discovered by descriptive observation of actual translation. They are not understood as prescriptive rules but as norms specific to a context. Therefore, norms change with time and culture, so translation re-visits the same problem over and over again.

Publications

He has published three books, a number of edited volumes and numerous articles, in both English and Hebrew, in the fields of translation theory and comparative literature. His articles have also appeared in translation in many other languages, and he is himself an active translator too (with about 30 books and many articles to his credit).

Books in English
  • In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. 1980.
  • Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1995.

Edited Books
  • Translation Theory: A Reader.Tel Aviv University: Dyonun. 1980.(English and Hebrew)
  • With Itamar Even-Zohar.Translation Theory and Intercultural RelationsThe Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. 1981.
  • Translation Across Cultures.New Delhi: Bahri Publications. 1987.
  • Introducing Translation Theory: Selected Articles.Tel Aviv University: Dyonun. 1991. 198 pp. (English and Hebrew)

Edited Journals

Literary Translations into Hebrew

References
  1. "European Society for Translation Studies: Gideon Toury, translation scholar, died on 4 October 2016 at the age of 74". Archived from the original on 19 January 2017. Retrieved 18 February 2018.
  2. Gideon Toury's publications
  3. "Die Bibliothek des israelischen Historikers Jacob Toury (1915-2004)". Archived from the original on 18 March 2014. Retrieved 18 March 2014.
  4. My way to translation studies
  5. Gideon Toury (translation scholar) interviewed in Tarragona, 2008 on YouTube
  6. IBBY, IBBY Honour List (1956-1980), April 1980, p.34
  7. Research Summer School
  8. Tel Aviv University Webflash 2000
  9. Bio at Tel Aviv University Archived 24 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  10. "Correspondence with Gideon Toury". Archived from the original on 19 March 2016. Retrieved 18 March 2014.
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