Fateful Coincidences. How does Someone Become a Translation Studies Scholar?

Abstract

In the 1970s, Translation Studies (TS) in Hungary had not yet emerged as an academic discipline. Translation was often the subject of scholarly essays and lectures, but there was no systematic research, no data collection, analysis, or conclusions about translation as a real-world phenomenon. Against this backdrop, my own path to becoming a translation scholar was not deliberately planned but instead unfolded through a series of eight coincidences that ultimately shaped my career.
The first coincidence was when my thesis supervisor invited me to translate for Gondolat Publishing House. Shortly afterward, a university professor who sat in on one of my classes at the language school where I was teaching asked me if I was interested in doing research in contrastive linguistics. I was. A third significant event occurred while I was working as a librarian at the Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where I had the chance to observe how scientists pursued rigorous, evidence-based research. Later, I joined the editorial staff of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ information bulletin on research and development, which further exposed me to the culture of scientific inquiry.
A fifth pivotal moment occurred when, at the Language Institute of Karl Marx University of Economics, I was assigned to summarize Revzin and Rozenzweig’s book on translation theory. This was my first true encounter with translation as a scholarly discipline. The sixth turning point came when my colleague, Gyula Ferenczy informally asked me to review his forthcoming Russian grammar book. I thoroughly revised it, which he gratefully accepted, noting my reliability. The seventh fateful coincidence happened during the internal defence of a colleague’s dissertation. Gyula Ferenczy, who had just been tasked with establishing the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Eötvös Loránd University, took appreciative note of some of my comments and invited me to join the new department as a lecturer. And finally, the eighth and most important coincidence came on September 21, 1973, when two significant events that would shape my career as a translation scholar coincided: the official opening of the new department and my marriage to István Bart, a literary translator. Our lifelong partnership gave me direct insights into translation competence, which I later sought to describe in linguistic terms.
My research, too, was shaped by similar contingencies. While teaching Russian-to-Hungarian translation, I noticed that my students’ translations, though grammatically correct, often sounded foreign. I then chanced upon an article by Ferenc Papp, which described my observation as the concept of quasi-correctness, meaning that translated texts differ from non-translated ones in their choice of grammatical structures and lexical items. I later adopted the term and tested it using a corpus of Russian originals, their Hungarian translations, and native Hungarian texts, demonstrating systematic differences in thematic organization.
A second avenue of research opened up before me after the political transition, when a sharp drop in demand for Russian translations led me to expand my research to include English, German, and French. To my surprise, I found that these Indo-European languages behaved similarly when contrasted with Hungarian. I called these differences “dynamic contrasts” and described the system of transfer operations translators use to overcome them. Finally, chance also played a role in my third major research result, the “asymmetry hypothesis.” After completing a conference paper claiming that explicitation and implicitation were symmetrical operations—that is, if there is explicitation from English to Hungarian translation, there will be implicitation
in the reverse direction—I began to wonder if this was really the case. Subsequently, a bidirectional corpus study showed that translators often explicate even when it is unnecessary, while missing chances for implicitation. This asymmetry has since been tested across different language pairs. In sum, my academic career demonstrates how accidents and coincidences, far from being trivial, can decisively shape both personal trajectories and the development of Translation Studies in Hungary.