Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Blaðsíða 24

22
According to Steiner, more recent decades have seen a
replacement of this discussion by a return to “hermeneutic,
almost metaphysical inquiries into translation and inter-
pretation”, as he characterises the fourth and final period,
which extends to the present time. During this space of
time interest in translation study has grown steadily, as has
the amount of published literature devoted to the subject.
The trend has generally been towards viewing the disci-
pline in a wide frame and including perspectives offered by
a number of other disciplines.
Classical philology and comparative literature, lexical statistics and
ethnography, the sociology of class-speech, formal rhetoric, poetics,
and the study of grammar are combined in an attempt to clarify the
act of translation and the process of “life between languages”.
(Steiner 1975:238.)
In addition, there has also been a profusion of very use-
ful attempts to qualify important individual questions, such
as the effective analysis of text types and their significance
for determining priorities in translation, the development of
language-pair oriented translation procedures, and the for-
mation of guidelines for translation criticism.
Using a chronological approach such as Steiner’s, with
fairly general, topical divisions, reflects the central direc-
tions pursued by translation study through the ages. The
considerable variation in the length of the individual peri-
ods (the first, for instance, extending over 1700 years and
the third and fourth scarcely more than a few decades) indi-
cates the accelerating speed with which new knowledge
has been acquired during this century.
Such a classification scheme, however, can only indicate
overall trends; numerous works published in recent years
still argue the same issues of “faithfulness”, in spirit or let-
ter, that were discussed by Roman writers and medieval
clergymen.