Since the publication of The Manipulation of Literature (Hermans, 1985), Comparative Literature scholars have been obliged to confront the manipulation involved in any cultural transfer, particularly through translation. Institutions of culture and the state play an important role in determining the ways texts cross tangible and intangible borders. Hermans denounced three types of marginalisation: the status of translation in Literary Studies and Comparative Literature, the peripheral position of translations in literary corpora, and the absolute supremacy of the source text. Underwriting these critiques, we welcome proposals dealing with non-canonized literature, objects of study rejected by dominant circles of culture and literary movements that aimed to destabilise established literary repertoires.

More than three decades after their arrival, we want to (ap)praise the Manipulation school and Polysystem Theory for the vital role they played in the discipline of Translation Studies. Indeed, the Polysystem Theory focused on the target text as a manipulated text that was produced in a specific literary, historical, political and social context. As Snell-Hornby points out: “Translation is seen as a text type in its own right, as an integral part of the target culture and not merely as the reproduction of another text” (1988: 24).

Their legacy was to help abolish epistemological slaveries that biased Otherness and made room for countercultural manifestations. Their heuristic tools enabled the analysis of literature as a complex and dynamic system, stressed the necessary interaction between theory and practice, introduced a descriptive, target-text-oriented approach and laid the groundwork for the study of norms that condition the production and reception of translations within a specific context, the position of translations within the literary system and the interaction between different national literatures.