TRANSLATING ÁRGIRUS KATHRYN MILUN Rice University, Houston USA Writing of the problems involved in French translations of modern Latin- American novelists, Antoine Berman notes: Comme les auteurs du XVI e siècle européen, Roa Bastos, Guimaraes Rosa, J.-M. Arguedas - pour ne citer que les plus grands - écrivent à partir d'une tradition orale et populaire. D'où le problème qu'ils posent à la traduction: comment restituer des textes enracinés dans la culture orale dans une langue comme la nôtre, qui a suivi une trajectoire historique, culturelle et littéraire inverse? 1 This question can also be asked of the project of translating the 16th century Hungarian romance of Prince Árgirus. Antoine Berman's response is that such a question must pose a true challenge for translation in our culture; it must lead to an historical and critical reflexion on the role and activity of translation so as to help translation in its function as a force of creative decentering within the ethnocentric impulse dominant in our culture. This challenge leads me to avoid addressing the problems involved in the English translation of the Árgirus romance as merely technical problems whose solution could be found in the purely linguistic domain. But there is an approach in translation studies which provides a wide framework within which to look at particular translation problems, and after a brief account of this approach we shall see just how this can be applied to the translation of Árgirus. Descriptive translation study As formulated in the work of Gideon Toury, 2 the descriptive branch of translation studies aims to study, describe and explain actual translation or translation practices and procedures. Presenting an argument for a more or Hungarian Studies 8/1 (1993) Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest