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
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
Reasons for emphasis on literary translation
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)
• Choice of what is translated
• Stereotypes, or canonical
• No strong data study
Unequal power relations (ii)
Translation strategies
Domesticating Foreignizing
An ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to Anglo-American
target-language cultural values Dominating in Anglo-American
translation culture Fluency preferred by publishers, readers, &
reviewers
Ethnocentric – imposes TC values Violent and unethical
Invisibility of translators Marginalizing of translation
Choosing a foreign text and developing a translation method along lines which are
excluded by dominant cultural values in the target language
Venuti’s preferred strategy Choice of marginal texts for TC Source-oriented translation Use of marginal TL discourses (minoritizing)
Disrupting existing canons Act of resistancy
[e.g. Tarchetti]
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
