Anthony Pym


Anthony David Pym is a scholar best known for his work in translation studies.
Pym is a currently Distinguished Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies at Rovira i Virgili University in Spain and Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He was a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies from 2010 to 2015, Visiting Researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from 2008 to 2016, Walter Benjamin Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna in 2015, and President of the European Society for Translation Studies from 2010 to 2016.

Biography

Pym attended Wesley College and the University of Western Australia, completing his BA at Murdoch University in 1981. He held a French government grant for doctoral studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he completed his PhD in Sociology in 1985. In 1983–84 he was a Frank Knox Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In 1992–94 he held a post-doctoral grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for research on translation history at the University of Göttingen, Germany. In 1994 he gave seminars on the ethics of translation at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris.
After years as a professional translator, journal editor and organiser of cultural events in France and Spain, he taught in the translation departments of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In 1994 he joined the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, where he set up the Intercultural Studies Group in 2000, postgraduate programs in translation in 2000, and a doctoral program in Translation and Intercultural Studies in 2003. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies since 2006. His permanent residence is in the village of Calaceite, Spain.

Thought and influence

Pym was one of the first to move the study of translation away from texts and towards translators as people. According to him, the development of the translation field in the West has been essentially a "history of translation theory", a limitation that he proposed to address by focusing on the translators themselves and the contexts in which they operate.
Pym also conceptualized translating as a form of risk management, rather than a striving for equivalence. He has hypothesized that translators can be members of professional intercultures, operating in the overlaps of cultures, and that their highest ethical goal is the promotion of long-term cross-cultural co-operation. Pym has stressed that the translators' loyalty should be in their profession and that the value of translation efforts lies in its contribution to intercultural relations.
In recent years he has been attracted to the concept of inculturation, through which he sees translation as one of the ways in which minority cultures are absorbed into wider cultural systems and can then modify those wider systems. Pym has also cited the role of technology, particularly the Internet in the translation of materials tailored to a specific local market. According to him, the proliferation of information does not necessarily mean that these will be received, hence, care should be taken so that the translated texts appeal to its target culture.
Pym's ideas have been contrasted with those of the American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti by the Finnish translation scholar Kaisa Koskinen, and his critique of Venuti has been commented on by Jeremy Munday and Mary Snell-Hornby.

Works