Such a position would be more or less compatible with the deep pedagogical desire of the approach that holds that "translational action is determined by its purpose [Skopos]" (Reiss and Vermeer 1984:101). That proposition is of some interest to us, mainly because the "translational action" it mentions embraces much more than just producing translations (all kinds of adaptations are included, as well as managing relations with clients). Unfortunately that is not quite the road we want to go down here. We are not about to assume that all localizers are automatically good localizers, that conscious decisions are made about distribution purposes and reception effects in each and every case, nor even that the search for purposes can solve all our specific problems about how to work on texts. We gladly concede that relatively few real-world localizers have enough time or pay to engage in ethical teleologies. A lot of work is done in blind accordance with traditions, customs, norms, conventions, or whatever it is that teachers teach; and a lot of translating is done within localization projects that actively blind the translator to any aspect of purposeful distribution, in ways we will review later. In fact, the misrepresentation or concealing of distribution (and the purposes involved) is one of the main problems of contemporary localization and translation across the board.
Our own argument here is strictly general. In accordance with the "series-of-links" model, the ideas that actual workers have about text transformation are necessarily based on previous distributions and localizations, even when those ideas are naïve or wrong. This is because there is already contact between the locales we know, and thus no pristine context in which any one "purpose" could be isolated in the first place. The Kuwaiti text was not underscored in French because of the nature or purpose of that particular text. It is far more likely to have been glossed because of traditional ideas about the defense of the French language. Similarly, Microsoft cannot really know the size of the potential market in Thailand, nor the exact resistances to distribution there, until its initial localization processes encounter feedback. There is thus rigorously no one-to-one relation between this or that particular distribution, this or
that purpose, this or that way of localizing. We cannot adequately conceptualize the relation by just thinking about the individual language worker confronting the individual text. This is precisely why the analysis of historical and culture-bound translational norms has become a keystone of Translation Studies (most prominently since Toury 1995). Something similar is required with respect to localization.
Distribution thus has purely general priority as a precondition for the practice of localization. If nothing has moved or is going to move, then there is no reason to transform texts. If someone is localizing or has localized, then something has moved or is meant to move.
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