Revisiting the Paradigm Revolution in Descriptive Translation Studies from the Perspective of the Scientific Research Programme

Abstract

Prior to the mid-1970s, translation studies were long dominated by source-text-oriented and prescriptive paradigms focusing on a priori equivalence, exhibiting clear signs of theoretical degeneration when confronted with the empirical reality of non-equivalence. Drawing on Imre Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programmes, this paper systematically revisits the paradigm revolution of Descriptive Translation Studies initiated by Gideon Toury. Toury successfully bridged the epistemological break within the discipline by establishing an irrefutable two-tier hard core comprising "target-culture orientation" and a "norm-centered" framework, along with a negative heuristic that forbids a priori "right-or-wrong" criticism and subjective attribution. Furthermore, by consolidating a protective belt comprising auxiliary hypotheses and analytical tools such as "adequacy and acceptability," "assumed translation," and the "coupled pairs" model, the programme effectively absorbed empirical anomalies including assumed translations. Its positive heuristic facilitated the formulation of probabilistic behavioral laws, namely the law of standardization and the law of interference, and expanded the theory into sociological translation studies, enabling translation research to achieve a progressive problemshift from isolated case descriptions to the prediction of macro-level regularities. This study further argues that Toury's programme remains highly instructive in the contemporary era of artificial intelligence-generated content. When confronted with the emerging empirical phenomenon of human-AI symbiotic translations, exploring new operational norms for the translation industry in the digital intelligence era still necessitates a steadfast empiricist commitment to objective description.