A spirited defense of a certain empiricism in Translation Studies (and in anything else concerning the study of cultures)

Abstract

The scientific method known as empiricism has been attacked in two influential books in Translation Studies. Mona Baker's Translation and Conflict sees all knowledge as being produced through narrative, thereby excluding the processes of repeated testing and dialogue that can be associated with an empirical approach. Further, Baker's failure to attend to textual linearity, voice, and narrator position lends her project an ideological essentialism that actively shuns such empirical testing. Lawrence Venuti's Translation Changes Everything, on the other hand, escapes essentialism by insisting on the active interpretation of all data. However, Venuti thereby falsely opposes hermeneutics to empi..