probability and fuzzy logic in translation studies: thecase of toury’s laws of translation

Despite the tantalizing prospects of fuzzy logic, it has been applied totranslation studies much later than into many other disciples in humanities.this tardiness is because fuzzy logic – which allows truth values to rangefrom 0 to 1, rendering propositions both true and false, on the one hand,and partially true and partially false, on the other hand – was initiallyexplained away as probability in disguise, and the rather naïve assumptionthat what can be achieved by fuzzy logic can also be achieved by the timehonored probability set it back for years. in the context of translationstudies, one might also quibble that the range of truth values is alreadyincorporated into toury's two contradictory laws of translation: the law ofstandardization and the law of interference. against this backdrop, thisstudy argues why the science of probability fails to capture uncertaintyimmanent in translation and why fuzzy logic is a more powerful apparatusfor this purpose. in so doing, using lambert and van gorp’s methodologyin analyzing an excerpt from the best-selling persian translation of the bookfunny in farsi, it shows how toury’s two contradictory laws can hold atonce if we are ready to have a paradigm shift from probability to fuzzylogic.