Anthony David Pym (born 1956 in Perth, Australia) is a scholar best known for his work in translation studies.
Pym is 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 (Perth, Australia) and the University of Western Australia, completing his BA (Hons) 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 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.
Pym is Distinguished Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies and coordinator of the Intercultural Studies Group at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain where he also ran a doctoral program. In addition, Pym is Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University and an international advisory board member for the Translation and Inter-Cultural Research Cluster at the University of Western Australia.
Pym was a Visiting Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey from 2008 to 2016, where he conducted research and lectures. From 2010 to 2015, he was a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. He was also President of the European Society for Translation Studies from 2010 to 2016 and Walter Benjamin Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna in 2015. In 2017, he joined the University of Melbourne's School of Languages and Linguistics.
Thought and influence
Pym was one of the first to move the study of translation away from texts and towards translators as people. He argued that translators are “authors” who can select the thoughts and emotions to express rather than “animators,” who merely present other's words. He views the translator as working with the author to create meaning, therefore, they both contribute to the meaning of the translation
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. According to Pym there are three types and levels of risks: credibility risk, uncertainty risk, and communicative risk. The credibility risk concerns the specificity of translation and relations between people, where the risk is the probability of the translator losing credibility. The second, uncertainty risk, involves a translator's cognitive processes when they are uncertain about how to present something. The final risk that Pym identified, the communicative risk, involves the interpretation of texts and contextualizing them, while creating a balance between both the high-risks and low-risks and the interpretatio
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 and cross-cultural communication.