Transcript Lawrence Venuti Venuti, Lawrence (1995a) The Translator’s Invisibility, London & New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of.

Lawrence Venuti
Venuti, Lawrence (1995a) The Translator’s Invisibility, London
& New York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation.
Towards an Ethics of Difference, London & New York:
Routledge
Venuti, Lawrence (2000) ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in
Lawrence Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader,
London & New York: Routledge, 468-488
Venuti’s setting
•
Translation into English
•
Literary texts past and present
•
‘Anglo-American culture’
•
Himself: American Italian translator & academic
Reasons for emphasis on literary translation
Literary translation has long set the standard applied in
technical translation (viz. fluency)
It has traditionally been the field where innovative
theories and practices emerge
Decision to domesticate or foreignize allowed only to
literary translators, because technical translation is
fundamentally constrained by the exigencies/pressures
of communication
Unequal power relations (i)
Translation flows
2.4% of British book production
2.96% of American book production
8-12% of French book production
14.4% of German book production
25.4% of Italian book production
…but flaw in argument (need to consider raw figures)
Unequal power relations (ii)
•
Choice of what is translated
•
Stereotypes, or canonical
•
No strong data study
Translation strategies
Domesticating
Foreignizing
An ethnocentric reduction of the foreign
text to Anglo-American
target-language cultural values
Choosing a foreign text and developing a
translation method along lines which are
excluded by dominant cultural values in
the target language
Dominating in Anglo-American
translation culture
Venuti’s preferred strategy
Choice of marginal texts for TC
Fluency preferred by
publishers, readers, &
reviewers
Ethnocentric – imposes TC values
Source-oriented translation
Use of marginal TL discourses
(minoritizing)
Disrupting existing canons
Violent and unethical
Act of resistancy
Invisibility of translators
[e.g. Tarchetti]
Marginalizing of translation
Assessment of Venuti’s model
See Pym, A. (1996) ‘Venuti’s Visibility’, Target 8(2): 165-177.
(+)

Translators as real people in political situations, related to their
societies (socio-cultural contexts – cfr Toury)

Quantitative aspects of translation policies
(-)

No specific methodology to apply to the analysis of translation –
case studies including a number of approaches

Issues raised (domesticating / foreignizing / translator’s
invisibility/power of publishers, etc) can be investigated in a variety
of ways