Tradition Versus Modernity

This volume marks several anniversaries. It is eighty years since both the founding of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the birth of Jiri Levy; forty years since Levy’s death; and fifty since the publication of his ground-breaking Czech Translation Theories and the ensuing debate with translation scholars around the world who, as soon became clear, had a somewhat distorted perception of the work of our leading Czech and Slovak theorists (Jiri Levy and Anton Popovic) and their methodological premises and conclusions. One of the many possible explanations for this is that many of the texts we now regard as canonical were published only in Czech. The fact that they were not translated is no doubt the main cause of the widely held belief that structuralism was a uniquely French phenomenon. Yet it was the Czech structuralists of the classical period of the Prague School who first proposed that a translation should be seen as an integral part of the target culture and, from the nineteen-twenties on, began raising issues that only found their way into mainstream translation theory several decades later (the integration of linguistics into the study of literature; the contribution of the individual to change and development; structure as a dynamic and dialectic event – a web of structural relationships consisting of a hierarchy of constantly realigning elements; confronting the positivist, determinist, metaphysical, essentialist approach with a relativistic view of phenomenology that sees individual speech-acts and products as historically variable entities). The aim of this publication is thus to ‘rediscover’, for the benefit of translation scholars both at home and abroad, the essential concepts and terms of reference of the Prague School, especially in the light of the ‘sociological revolution’ in this field of study, and to encourage debate about the importance of traditional methods and approaches for the future development of our discipline.