James Holmes

James Holmes (1924 – 1986) was an American translation theorist of the early phase and he himself was a poet and translator. Dismissing the concept of equivalence he maintained that the referent of the translated work was not the same as that of the SL text but a linguistic formulation. He borrowed this idea from Roland Barthes who made a distinction between works (mostly literary) that describe an external world and works (like those in literary criticism) that comment about another work. A commentary on another piece of literature is what he means by a linguistic formulation. The language of the latter is “meta-language”; interpreted this way, translations too would come under the category of works that use meta-language. Holmes was specifically interested in verse translation. He argued that verse translation is a unique form of meta-language because the translated poem aspires to be a work of art in its own right. It is meta-literature because it comments upon another literary work but it is also generating a new literary work that invites critical comments. Translation thus has a dual purpose as “meta-literature and as primary literature” and the term that best suits a verse translation would be “metapoem” (qtd in Gentzler 92).

Thus there is a shift in focus from problems of equivalence. As Gentzler points out, what is analyzed are two things: the relation of the translated text to the SL text within the framework of the literary tradition of the source language and the relation of the SL text to the translated text within the framework of the receptor-language culture. Holmes was placing translation within specific contexts and attempting to look at them in a comprehensive manner. His major contribution is his essay “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” published in 1972 in which he outlined the scope of the relatively young area of translation studies. He demarcated the field into three broad areas: the descriptive branch where translations are described, the theoretical branch which explains the theories that inform the process of translation and the applied branch where the information gained from the former two branches is used for practical application. Holmes's concepts helped in the evolution of translation theories that concentrated more on the process of translation and the reception of the translated text in the target language.