Gideon Toury

Gideon Toury is known for his work in the area similar to Even-Zohar. His most famous work is In Search of a Theory of Translation , which is a collection of his papers based on his field study in translation, published in 1980. He first started off by working on a larger project which was “The History of Literary Translation into Hebrew” in which he tried to understand the actual reasons behind choice of works to be translated, and to discover if there was a set of rules that governed translations within a particular polysystem. Toury's theory was that the reasons for choosing a particular work to translate were more often non-literary or ideological than literary. It was also guided by the personal preference of the translator and the purpose of the translation. It is no wonder that Toury's translation theories are thought to be target-oriented.

Toury disagreed with translation theories that were source-oriented. Translation theories down the years tried to evaluate their adequacy in terms of the correspondence of the translation with the source text. Toury's theory opposed this concept. He believed that translations were somewhere in the middle between two opposing poles – that of complete equivalence or correspondence with the source text, and of complete acceptability in the target language. He maintained that no translation can ever be completely acceptable in a receptor culture as it will have many new elements that cannot easily be assimilated. The converse is also true that no translation can ever be completely true to the source language as it will be governed by different cultural norms.