On Justification in Translation Studies: Some Comments and a Research Report

A descriptive analysis of translations, such as that outlined in Toury (1995), is said to involve the establishment of translation relationships within coupled pairs of replacing and replaced textual segments. But how is one to assess the significance of particular kinds of segment for the entire text under analysis? The present article tackles this methodological issue and reports on a study designed to provide quantitative data to answer that question. For that purpose, an analysis was conducted of translations by Frederico Mueller, the first Brazilian translator of the writings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. This study may prove useful in highlighting the role of quantitative text analyses in Translation Studies.