Translation and Normativity

So much has been written in the last twenty years about norms and their relevance to translation that it is reasonable to assume at least a certain familiarity with the concept of norms as such (cf. Baker 1998 for a concise statement and references). Allow me therefore to preface my remarks with no more than a brief reminder, in the form of a quotation from Thomas Merton’s 1942 essay ‘The Normative Structure of Science’. It is a very traditional statement in more ways than one, but Merton’s definition of ‘the ethos of science’ in terms of values and norms can readily be translated from the world of the sciences into that of translation: