Case Studies in Translation: The Study of Translation Cases

Although the professional reality of translation always involves a concrete assignment a translator has to perform, there is, surprisingly, little evidence that this fact gets reflected in translation studies, which are primarily aimed at abstracting from individual cases and obtaining a generalised picture of the translation process. This paper, by contrast, seeks to give a programmatic survey of what case studies in translation could possibly offer to translatology. It is an attempt to point out the many advantages case studies have over abstract theorising. Indeed, their findings could provide traditional translation studies with a much more solid empirical basis than what current research has at its disposal. Moreover, a study of translation cases would yield more specific results, even if at the cost of greater generality.