In their focus on the social in translation, André Lefevere and Anthony Pym are more alike than different: both theorists insist on tracing specific acts and facts of translation to their social determinants; both understand social determinants to be large-scale sociopolitical forces with historical continuity lasting over periods of years, decades, even centuries.
But there are also significant differences in the two approaches. One that I hinted at throughout my discussion on Lefevere in chapter 4 lies in the relative honesty or openness or self-reflexivity of the two theorists’ theorizing: whereas Lefevere, in accordance with his scientistic Universe of Discourse, wants to portray stable facts uncovered by stable theories (or methods), Pym stays in process with his own thinking, showing how he came to think in certain ways and how he still isn’t quite sure this or that is the most productive way of seeing things. This latter approach is rhetorically irritating to systems theorists, who consider such personal disclosure to be mere self-indulgence, the theorist rambling on about himself or herself rather than getting down to the matter at hand, that is, the actual systems; but for the local, experiential, personal theorist, this “rambling” is anything but self-indulgent. It is a modeling of the process of theorization, of systems building, if you like (although these “systems” never quite seem to get fully built), and it is intended to give the reader not only an experience of the theorist’s process but also a sense of how he or she might proceed from where the theorist left off.
At the simplest level, this means that a theorist such as Pym is highly unlikely to say things like “There is one level on which translation remains a prescriptive operation: translators would be well advised to bow to the dictates of the dictionary” (Lefevere 1992a, 101). As we’ll see, Pym says some very similar things in his book, but addresses them in a very different rhetoric. The obvious problem with Lefevere’s remark is that he clearly means a level on which translation theory, not translation, remains a prescriptive operation. This is part of Lefevere’s quite normal systemic tendency to reify representations as realities: the theorist prescribes for the translator, and what the translator subsequently does is called “prescriptive”; the theorist systematizes a social field, and the field is called “systemic.” This process of prescribing, systematizing, and calling is one of the practices that should be covered under Lefevere’s wonderful concept of rewriting but isn’t. It is notoriously difficult to stand outside your own ideology long enough to realize just how thoroughly it saturates your thinking—which is one reason why more personal and experiential theorists as much as possible avoid trying to get outside their ideology, preferring instead to explore it as fully and as complexly as possible from the inside, from wherever they happen to be standing. One of the things systems theorists are typically (almost necessarily) blind to is their own construction and outward projection of the systems in and with which they work. One way of avoiding this particular pitfall at least some of the time is by telling personal stories about coming to think and see and articulate things in specific ways, especially when one of the things you see (even if only occasionally) is how often you are blinded by your own assumptions.
And in Epistemological Problems (1992) Pym provides a striking example of this latter approach. His book, as his subtitle suggests, is an edited transcription of an actual “seminar” he gave for “thinking students” (also faculty members) from March 17 to April 3, 1992, at the University of Las Palmas, where he was teaching at the time. The eight two-hour taped sessions became the eight chapters of the book, and in editing those tapes for publication, he retained not only the sloppiness of ordinary speech— “I have retained a lot of repetition and several curious sideshows that don’t really lead anywhere” (11)—but also various passages in which he is clearly thinking out loud, formulating ideas for the first time, and reflecting upon the process; also, “Where there were questions or comments, I have indicated the speakers’ names whenever possible” (11). He apologizes: “The transcription of the tapes has provided several occasions for self-criticism. In particular, I have seen how I tend to avoid questions rather than confront them with honest answers. I thus offer apologies to those who didn’t receive the answers they deserved” (12).
As I say, this sort of thing baffles and irritates most systemic theorists: why would anyone deliberately go to all this trouble, with the risk (possibly even the full intention!) of appearing sloppy, stupid, indecisive, unsure? Why would Pym not only retain all this orality in a version edited for publication—the repetitions and the dead ends and the second thoughts and the apologies—but base his book on a transcription of a live event in the first place? Most books based on a lecture series are first written out, with an eye to ultimate publication, then read to the audience more or less exactly as written, with only a few occasional digressions and parenthetical comments that in the published version are either ignored or edited to fit that version seamlessly. Because systems theorists privilege systems, systemic thought, carefully planned systematicity, they want to control every detail of the rhetorical presentation of their ideas in advance; hence the importance of putting writing before speech, argumentation before conversation, even to the point of reading densely brilliant and overlong conference papers in a rapid-fire machine-gun monotone that few members of the audience can comfortably follow. To these systems thinkers, Pym’s reverse approach must seem quixotic beyond belief—or perhaps only arrogant (“he thinks he’s so smart that even his ramblings are worth listening to”).
And this is the major drawback in Pym’s approach: it stands outside hegemonic paradigms for academic thinking, which are systemic, and thus risks seeming unthinking. If Pym doesn’t have his system worked out down to the finest detail in advance, if he makes it up as he goes along, perhaps even changes his mind halfway through, then he doesn’t have a system; if he doesn’t have a system, he’s not a systematic thinker; and an unsystematic thinker is no thinker at all. To write this way is, therefore, within the prevailing paradigms of Western theoretical discourse, to proclaim yourself stupid—to prove to all thinking students that you are at best a chaotic thinker, at worst (and due to the hegemonic definition of thinking this “at worst” follows immediately and inexorably) an idiot, an ordinary pretheoretical or prescientific or prerational person.
Interestingly enough, Lefevere himself attacks the ethnocentric biases behind this assumption when it appears in Western readings of Arabic poetry: “W. R. Polk reminds the Western reader of the fact that the ‘audience was expected to break in at the end of each verse, to comment, to recite comparable verses, and to savor the artistry of the poet’ (1992a, xxi), explaining both the—to the Western mind—’chaotic’ structure of the qasidah and its lack of sequential narrative as defined in logical terms” (83). Compare this description with Pym’s book, which is also interrupted by questions from the audience and meanders far more anecdotally and nonsequentially than a systematic or logical thinker like Lefevere would accept. For a systems theorist like Lefevere, this is an invalid leap: what applies to other rewriters, translators and critics and editors and anthologists and the rest, doesn’t apply to a rewriter like himself, the systems theorist. In the name of systemic cohesion, though, shouldn’t it?
Pym calls his approach “semiotic,” but his conception of semiosis, which he develops at length in chapters 2 and 3 (and throughout), is far closer to Peirce than to Saussure, far closer to Julia Kristeva (the “chora”) than to Jacques Derrida, and far closer to Derrida than to most semioticians, which last are by and large systems thinkers. Pym’s model of semiosis is one of open-ended process, a never-ending series of “takes” on things, interpretations of signs that create one thing as sign in and through the act of interpreting it and create another thing, the interpretation itself, as another sign (dependent on the first) that itself must in turn be interpreted, and so on and so on. He builds this semiotic theory out of a series of readings of major theorists (especially Derrida and Quine), which he passed out to the participants in the seminar in advance, and which they may or may not have read; most of the “thinking students” who ask him questions during the course of the lectures are, not surprisingly, his colleagues (one of them his wife, Monique Caminade). So he has placed constraints on semiosis in advance, and in his “Preface to the Written Version” he apologizes both for making those constraints as lax as they were and for not getting rid of them altogether:
Further, with respect to the actual ideas put forward, the transcription underscores that the model of semiosis, of a constant movement of meaning, is rather idealistic and at odds with the cruelly final nature of the translator’s work. Since only a few of my examples really carry semiosis beyond four or five terms, they are a little incongruent with the theoretical notion of an endless series of alternatives. I should probably have placed more emphasis on non-binarism as “more than one solution,” and less on open series. That is, my epistemology should have focused more on problem-solving activities and less on the generation of alternatives. But this is a general reserve that I would extend to all deconstructionist approaches to translation. (12)
Since we’re out of systems theory now and into more open-ended and personalized semioses, I want to argue with a single point Pym makes here, and maybe even use a personal example to make my own point: this is a whole new Universe of Discourse we’re into now, and I feel less bound to suppress my opinions and experiences rhetorically. The thing is, I have my doubts about “the cruelly final nature of the translator’s work” that Pym speaks of. As I’ve been writing this chapter I’ve been interrupted several times, on successive days, by the fax machine spewing out addenda and corrigenda to a translation job that I thought I had finished a month and a half ago: it’s a chainsaw manual, English to Finnish, neither a particularly interesting topic nor a particularly attractive direction for me, as I do most of my work from Finnish to English. The translation agency that commissioned the work is having the manual translated into a dozen different languages, working with nearly that number of different translators, all of whom have had queries of various kinds during the protracted process; these queries have generated alterations in passages previously translated, and the alterations have generated new queries, and so on. The manufacturer, too, has been modifying the manual as the translation process has proceeded. Frankly, I don’t know if this job will ever end. The flurry of faxes has so far shown no sign of abating. “Cruelly final”? Rather, blissfully final! I would love to see the end of this job!
Of course, Pym also means that the translator does finally have to settle for a single rendering of each word, each phrase, each passage, ultimately of each text; but that’s not always true either. That’s only the “normal” process, the process that has been “normatized” as the core or basis of all “true” translation, translation “proper,” the ideal process of translation, according to which you begin with one source-language text and after a potentially endless but factually finite series of drafts you end up with one target-language text, which is the “cruelly final” end product. But there are a number of variables in that process that the ideal model artificially controls:
(a) Certain economic constraints connected with publication (in the fullest sense of “making public”) do usually require a translator to select a single draft as the “final” one and submit it, upload it into an agency’s computer network over the modem or UPS (United Parcel Service) a book manuscript to an editor or whatever. But not all translation is public. I have generated numerous English drafts of Finnish poems that I have subsequently cut from the collection I’ve stored on-line at http://www.olemiss.edu/~dir/turn-tc.html, with the result that no single draft of the rejects is or ever will be the “cruelly final” version. Some people, “nonprofessionals” considered by many to be beneath the consideration of professional translation theorists, never translate for publication: they translate for the fun of it, or to help themselves learn a foreign language. For them there is no pressure to produce a “cruelly final” version.
(b) In certain sociocultural contexts multiple translation is not only tolerated but favored, especially the contexts that privilege “variations” on poetic texts, as in the publications that showcase student work. For example, the Exchanges journal that Daniel Weissbort edits for the literary translation program at the University of Iowa encourages multiple versions by the same translator. Multiple translation can be an extremely productive teaching tool as well, and depending on the teacher the series of translations may or may not aim toward the creation of a “cruelly final” version; personally, I would prefer to see a series of parallel texts, because that enables students to explore a wider variety of translation methods without pushing that variety into a false teleology.
(c) Even when a particular translation process is aimed at a single final text, there are often several copy-editing stages that follow the translator’s supposed “completion” of the work, introducing an element of uncertainty into the translator’s feeling of “finality” about any given version. When I translated Aleksis Kivi’s 1864 play Nummisuutarit (“Heath Cobblers”) in 1976, I thought I was done with the work and sent it out to publishers, all of whom rejected it and continued rejecting it over the years until 1992, when I finally found an editor at a small ethnic press in Minnesota willing to take a chance on a classic Finnish play. I then revised my translation substantially, eliminating almost all traces of the archaism I had originally thought so wonderful, and submitted it for consideration; they accepted it and copy edited my manuscript extensively, leading me to make some more changes and generally to take a whole new look at many passages I thought I knew. They wanted to get it into print by FinnFest in late July, a huge annual Finnish-American festival (that year being held in Thousand Oaks, California) that constitutes the best annual market for Finnish books. They got me the page proofs in late May, just as I was leaving to drive to Los Angeles with my family, heading for Finland for a month and a half, then back to L.A. in time for FinnFest, and I spent two hours on the phone from my parents’ house in Phoenix, going over corrections, some of which required me again to change my translation in minor ways. Two passages needed to be compared with the Finnish original, which was, of course, back at home in Mississippi; but I would be in Finland in a few days, so I promised to drive, immediately upon my arrival, straight to the nearest library in Helsinki, check the two passages, and fax back my corrections. I did so, and assumed that we now had a “cruelly final” version—and, well, that time I was right, but I had thought that before, and could not be sure that I would not be wrong again. (And what if the translation sells so well that the publishers want me to undertake a revised edition? Not likely, but not beyond the realm of possibility either.)
And maybe this would be a good time to address the question of personal anecdotes in translation theory. Throughout the lectures that make up his book Pym is constantly telling stories about himself, but he doesn’t really defend them explicitly, except by reference to “orality”; nor does his “semiotic” or “deconstructive” method necessarily justify their use. He could have constructed his argument semiotically without telling stories about the first time he read Derrida and his girlfriend wanted him to come to bed, or about the first time he traveled out of Australia, or about the time he bad-mouthed a previous translator’s work to a client and won the client but then was himself bad-mouthed to that same client by that same previous translator and lost the client back to him, or about his experiences at a conference in Barcelona, where, as an invited expert on Australian culture, he confessed his uncertainty as to the meaning of “the bush,” and so on. He doesn’t need all this for his open-ended conception of semiosis to work. He didn’t need to start with a live oral event and move from there to tape and transcription and editing to drive his point home about semiotic series. There’s more going on methodologically in personal anecdotes than the theory of semiosis can justify.
Pym calls himself, in the prefatory passage I quoted above, a “deconstructionist” theorist, and certainly deconstruction has had a salutary impact on his thinking, especially, I think, in his determination to loosen up the play in theoretical systems— “play” in the sense of the play in a steering wheel, of course, but also as playfulness. In a sense he is a chaos theorist without the name: the asystemic play that he explores and expands in his work could also be called, following chaos theory, the “turbulence” in a system, or the “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (see Gleick, 1987). But Pym is emphatically not a deconstructionist in his recognition that there are times when you have to bring a potentially endless series of playful semioses to an end—an end that is invariably controlled not by systemic principle or precept but by experiential practicalities:
For me, equivalence isn’t at the beginning of semiosis. It has nothing to do with looking back to the value of the first signified. Equivalence happens at the end of semiosis. It’s a belief that something is equivalent to something else, that semiosis can come to an end. In theory, there could always be further discussion. But in practice, as translating translators, we hope readers will be gullible enough to believe we can end semiosis. We hope readers will accept our texts as adequate translations. We hope we’ll be seen as producers of equivalence. And the kind of equivalence we produce can then only exist as a belief held by the receivers of our work. (115)
Once again I want to argue with this, especially with his rhetorical strategy of moving from “for me” to “for us” (as translating translators). (He also passes through a stage of flat factual generalizations—“Equivalence happens at the end of semiosis” and “It’s a belief”—but these could still be read as prefaced by an implicit or remembered “for me.”) The “for me” statement is personal and moves powerfully through personal preference, personal experience, personal discovery to a significant insight, that “equivalence” is not only an illusion, it’s a pragmatically necessary illusion that a translator imposes on a translation job in order to bring semiosis to a halt. This is an exciting and productive discovery that presumably arose out of Pym asking himself things like, What does equivalence really mean for me? how do I really feel about it? do I believe in it? do I use it? and so on—and then presenting it to us as his personal revelation, not as a systemic truth but as something arising out of a critical engagement with his own experience of translating. (I personally wonder to what extent my enthusiasm for this particular insight is conditioned by the fact that I said some very similar things about equivalence in The Translator’s Turn [21–22]). By contrast, André Lefevere simply ignores equivalence: it is not a relevant part of his systems analysis, so he never mentions it. This too makes an important statement, especially in a theoretical tradition that has talked of little else but equivalence for two millennia—but it doesn’t provide much assistance to the reader who says, puzzled, “Yes, I see what you’re saying, but how does equivalence fit into all this?” Pym’s subtext seems to be something on the order of “the only way all these translation theorists could go on pronouncing on equivalence and never saying anything new must have been that no one ever stopped to test his or her theories against his or her own personal experience of the thing; so 1 stopped and tested the notion against my experience, and here’s what I found.”
But then, having drawn his audience into his discovery, Pym next attempts rhetorically, through what Kenneth Burke calls identification, to draw them into a homogeneous community of those who agree with his insight: “we hope readers will be gullible enough,” “we hope readers will accept our texts,” “we hope we’ll be seen,” and so forth. My hope shall be ours. It’s an effective rhetorical technique, of course, a powerful subliminal suggestion that, based on your experience, you already agree with me; but it’s rhetorically constructed specifically to block (or at least to go on silencing) listeners’ and readers’ own processes of personal discovery, their testing of Pym’s claims against their own experiences. As Pym’s “thinking student,” I stop to think about this, to test it, and find that it doesn’t always work (and now write about it, breaking silence—typically easier for a colleague to do than for a student, as Pym’s own book illustrates). It works with my translations of chainsaw manuals, and even of my correspondence with an editor at a university press that I’m hoping will contract with me to translate Maria Jotuni’s 1936 novel Huojuva talo (“Tottering House”), but it’s not true of every translation I’ve ever done. I have lots of ways of bringing translational semiosis to a halt, only some of which involve equivalence—and only some of which lend themselves to articulation. Sometimes, for example, especially but not exclusively in literary translation, some rendering that feels less equivalent forces itself on me over a rendering that feels more equivalent, and I don’t know why—but I have been known to go with my intuition. I have arrogant moods when I’d rather be flashy than accurate. I generally don’t translate chainsaw manuals in those moods, and when I do, I force myself into another mood, hating it, but doing it anyway to protect my supplemental income. Sometimes, too, thoughts of equivalence reopen semioses, as when I wonder whether it would be better to go with (the illusion of) equivalence of mood or of semantics. When I translate a text as an example for a theoretical piece I’m writing, I’ll often use conflicting equivalence-images to keep the semiosis open—as in my discussion of Eino Leino’s “Erotessa” (“At Parting”) in The Translator’s Turn (164–66). Pym might argue that these examples lie outside the “core” of translating that he’s talking about, a core of which translations of chainsaw manuals are more typical; but I resist his attempts to restrict my experience of translation to that “core,” by whatever subtle rhetorical means.
It should be clear that personal experience is an extremely effective crowbar, useful for breaking through the shiny carapaces of authority— whether it is the authority of an ossified belief structure that no one has questioned for decades, even centuries, or of a writer or teacher like Anthony Pym (or Doug Robinson) who wields his personal experience like a weapon, convincing even some thinking students that their experiences are the same, and that they should therefore agree with the guru. I personally agree with Pym that “translation cannot be taught or theorized in an authoritarian way” (13) and recognize with him the paradoxes in that very statement: “Worse, if I can say that translation shouldn’t be taught in an authoritarian way, how can I, as a supposed authority, pretend to say anything about translation, including what I’ve said so far?” (13). Worse still, saying that “translation cannot be taught or theorized in an authoritarian way” is theorizing translation in an authoritarian way, and worst of all—since translation has been taught and theorized in thousands of authoritarian ways—the pronouncement can only be defended as “true” or “valid” through a lengthy process of authoritarian philosophical reasoning intended to define “translation,” “teachability,” and “theorizability” in special restricted ways (a person who is taught to translate following rigid rules hasn’t really learned to translate, because translating is something very different from that).
But this is only a preliminary formulation for Pym, almost, in fact, a canard—though I do believe that he believes it when he says it (and so do I). He says specifically of this pronouncement on authority that “my first idea is a minor paradox that has to be worked out” (13), and in some sense the whole book becomes a working out of that paradox (and others), a semiotic process of thinking through his attitudes on authority by testing them against his experience, leading finally to an entire chapter (7) on “The positive uses of authority.” In his final chapter, too, he keeps coming back to the question of authority, using his authority as a teacher and a theorist to tell students that semiosis and indeterminacy and open-endedness are liberating ideas (or experiences) for translators while they’re working or talking about their work with other translators (what he calls “internal knowledge”) but useless for the essential “external” process of convincing an agency or a client that you’re a good translator and worthy of its or his or her business:
The most important part of a translation job is perhaps gaining and keeping authority. But will this help you avoid errors? Not really. It’s just a bag of tricks that might help you build up a solid working relationship with your client. But this should happen little by little, through the asking of a few questions at the beginning and then longer discussions as you go on. The process should be carried out as a careful negotiation. Of course, you can’t start off with a long list of questions. If you do this, your client will think you know nothing and you’ll never establish any authority. And you can’t start off criticizing a source text, because if the author hears about it people will soon be saying you’re a bad worker blaming your tools. So a gradual process of exchange and mutual help is the best way of establishing a good working relationship. And this is perhaps the most important part of a translation. (145)
It’s also helpful to note that this pronouncement comes at the end of the book, after Pym has taken us through a “gradual process” of working through texts and examples and stories and questions and answers, fielding comments from the audience, building trust in his intelligence, flexibility, sense of humor, and experience of translation. If this “authoritarian” tone were Pym’s only rhetorical mode, if his entire book had been constructed to tell us in precise detail what the most important part of a translation is, I would have found it unbearable; by the end of the book, with its radical notions of translation as open-ended semiosis and its complex presentation of Pym as a person, I’m ready to let him give me a little piece of advice—actually, to recognize that his advice fits my experience of working with clients and agencies as well. Above all, by now he has established the difference between the actual process of translating, which is semiotic, and what Erving Goffman calls “the presentation of self in everyday life,” the production and maintenance of a public image as competent translator. He’s not telling us, in other words, how to translate— only how to present ourselves as translators, how to play the very real game (most translators’ livelihood depends on it!) of “being translators.”
This is, perhaps, a circumlocutory way of establishing authority; it almost certainly takes Pym longer to prove to academic audiences that he’s worth listening to than it does speakers and writers who signal their authority with a more formal theoretical discourse. A chatty, personal style, with all the hesitations and false starts and “I don’t knows” of ordinary nontechnical conversation, is initially not conducive to “gaining and keeping authority” in an academic setting—but once Pym has established his authority as a translation theorist, the personal, anecdotal means through which he has established it has made it a significantly different kind of authority, grounded less in systemic cohesion than in a reciprocal process of asserting and testing claims against experience:
Instead of saying “I know what the text means; let’s see if you can find out,” we should be saying “Let’s see how we can translate this text.”
MONIQUE CAMINADE: Don’t you first need some kind of agreement between teachers and students? Don’t they have to decide how they ‘re going to work and how they’re going to decide between different propositions. For example, how can you decide between situations where the teacher says “It’s right, but yes” and “It’s right, but no”? And what should the teacher do about students who want to carry on debating what you call mistakes? We see this problem in our oral language exams, where students are really unable to evaluate themselves. They can’t see the mistakes they ‘re making or how serious they are. So I think you first need a scale of values so that students can know how to evaluate themselves. We have to decide how many marks are going to be taken off for each kind of error.
I’m not so sure. I don’t see why a debate with a student should be a problem. And I don’t really know why we should talk about self-evaluation when the class situation should enable some kind of mutual evaluation….
MONIQUE CAMINADE: But it’s a general problem of evaluation.
No, not in class.
HEIDRUN WITTE: But you could talk until the year 2000 about something that you know is wrong and a. student is sure is right. You can’t go on forever with your idea about talk and discussion and debate. Sooner or later you’re going to have to tell a student “Sorry, but you’re wrong. “ You, as a teacher, are going to have to impose your authority.
Yes, of course. With mistakes it’s quite simple. I can refer to a dictionary, a grammar or a reference book, falling back on the unholy Trinity. (108–9)
And so on. It’s an incredibly uneconomical way of presenting an argument, if what you have is a ready-made argument that you want to present as is, without change or diminishment; but it’s an extremely rich way of exploring possibilities in a community of experienced practitioners who are used to articulating their views but are forced to rethink those views when they are contradicted or challenged by someone else. It’s a process much closer to the consensual “ways of knowing” that some feminist scholars are calling more typically feminine (though perhaps only because that’s how women have been conditioned in patriarchal society) than to the more abstract and systemic ways they are calling typically masculine. And it is no surprise, perhaps, that as women move increasingly into translation theory, after centuries of being locked out or peripheralized, they are frequently finding their voices in these more personal and consensual, more tentative and exploratory modes that leave plenty of room for everybody’s voice, everybody’s experience, everybody’s opinion.
Much as I am drawn to personalized approaches, however, I really don’t want to privilege them over more systemic approaches. We need the perspectives on translation that both overarching systems theories and localized personal anecdotes and discussions can bring. Above all, we need conversation between the two approaches, mutual testing of theories and claims, so that systems theorists can listen closely to the personal anecdotes people like Anthony Pym and (next chapter) Jill Levine tell and, where necessary, adjust their systems to account for them; and personal or anecdotal “chaos” theorists can listen closely to the systemic explanations of various translator behaviors and attitudes that the systems theorists adduce and, where necessary, adjust the stories they tell to account for broader, more global forces that they increasingly realize have a significant impact on their behavior.
And I think Pym’s most attractive claim is that translators, as members of intercultural communities, are perfectly situated to mediate between discourses in just this way: “The position and role of translators is thus primarily to straddle the borders between cultures and to bring about interaction, gaining a form of knowledge that is inaccessible to many of those who remain within cultural frontiers” (150). If we take systems theories and chaos theories, abstract globalism and local personalism to be different cultures, say, masculine and feminine cultures, or academic and lay cultures, who could be better at living in the borderlands between those two cultures than translators—or, one would hope, translation theorists? The time for exclusive allegiances, to this culture or that, this system or that, this rhetorical mode or that, is past. Or rather, as Pym would say, those allegiances may have their place in our attempts to establish our collective authority as a growing field of study among governmental and academic bureaucrats who don’t really understand what we do; but our “internal knowledge,” our discussions of important issues among fel low translators, is, as Pym says, “fundamentally intercultural” (150) and should partake of both broad methodological cultures, the systemic and the personal. A translator without (at least) one foot in each culture is not going to last long in the profession; may the profession of translation theory gradually be transformed along similar intercultural lines.