How devoted can translators be?: Revisiting the subservience hypothesis

In a seminal contribution published in Target in 1998, Daniel Simeoni argued for a habitus-governed model of explanation for translation and suggested that subservience might be a defining feature of this habitus, a primordial norm. The objective of the present article is twofold. First, it aims to recontextualize the ‘subservience hypothesis’ by shedding light on the empirical work underlining it. Second, following the approach developed in Simeoni (2001), the author tests again the hypothesis through textual analysis, by studying the early translation history into French of a textbook entitled Marketing Management by Philip Kotler. The author explores to what extent traces of the primordial norm, as defined by Simeoni (2001), can be found in the first four French editions of this scholarly text produced over the period (1967–1981), two of which were signed by a professional translator and the others by a marketing scholar.