Introducing

Translation Studies
Theories and applications

Jeremy Munday

London and New York


Q Translating the foreign: the
(in)visibility of translation
( Key concepts
Venuti: the 'invisibility' of the translator in the modern publishing world.
Venuti: 'foreignizing' vs. 'domesticating' translation, and the 'call for action'.
Berman: the 'negative analytic' and deformation of translation.
Literary translators' accounts of their work: 'ear' and 'voice'.
The power network of the publishing industry.
The reception of translation - reception theory and translation reviewing.
Key texts
Berman, A. ( 1 984192) L'epreuve de I'etranger: Culture et tradudon dons I'Allemagne roman-
tiqu, Paris: ~ d i t i o n sGallimard; translated (1992) by S. H e p a e r t as The Experience
of the Rreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, Albany: State University of
New York.
Berman, A. (1985b12000) 'Translation and the trials of the foreign'. translated by
L. Venuti, in L. Venuti (ed.) (2000), pp. 284-97. (Originally published as 'La traduction
comme epreuve de I'etranger', Texte (1985): 67-8 I).
Felstiner, J. (1980) Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, Stanford. CA: Stanford
University Press.
Levine, 5. (199 1) The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fidon. St Paul, MN:
Graywolf Press.
Venuti, L. (ed.) (1 992) Rethinking Translation: Discourse. Subjectivity, Ideology, London and
New York: Routledge.
Venuti, L. (1995) The Translatorf Invisibility:/\ History of Translation, London and N e w York:
Routledge.
Venuti.. L. (1
, 998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and
N e w York: Routledge.
9.0 Introduction
Chapter 8 examined varieties of cultural studies that have focused o n transla-
t i o n In this chapter, we concentrate o n other research that deals with culturdl
difference and with the interface between the source culture and the foreign.
linking ideology and dominant discourse t o translation strategies.
CULTURAL AND POLITICAL AGENDA
Section 9.1 focuses o n key areas of the influential work of Lawrence
Venuti, notably the 'invisibility' of translation and the translator 1GXii$o-
American culture (section 9.1.1) and the 'domesticating' and 'foreignizing'
~--"-2
translation strategies which are available to the translator (section 9.1.2).
Section 9.1.3 considers work by Antoine Berman that follou7s a similar line,
Berman's 'negative analytic' attacking the homogenization of the translation
of literary prose.
The remainder of the chapter considers other related areas and players in
the translation process. Thus, in section 9.2 a description is given of what
practising literary translators say about their practices, in order to see if their
own view of their work tallies with Venuti's and Berman's theories. Section
9.3 deals with crucial aspects of the powerful publishing industry and sec-
1 tion 9.4 discusses criticisms of Venuti. Finally, section 9.5 examines
the reception of translations, notably the reviewing process, and what this
reveals about cultural attitudes t o translation in general. Following this, the
case study illustrates one method of investigating these ideas by analyzing the
reviews of a translated text.
9.1 Venuti: the cultural and political agenda of translation
Like the other cultural theorists discussed in chapter 8, Venuti ~nsiststhat the
scope of translation studies needs t o be broadened to take account of the
value-driven - naturi-d-;he sociocultural framekwrk. ~hus-h'e-co~iests'
. -""
~ o u v G e n t i f i c descriptive
' inodel w ~ t hits aim of producing 'value-free'
norms and laws of translation (see chapter 7):
Toury's method . . . must still turn to cultural theory in order to assess the
significanceof the data, to analyze the norms. Norms may be in the first instance
linguistic or literary, but they will also include a diverse range of domestic
values, beliefs, and social representations which carry ideological force in serving
the interests of specific groups. And they are always housed in the social institu-
tions where translations arc produced and enlisted in cultural and political
agendas.
(Venuti 1998: 29)
In addition to governments and other politically motivated institutions,
which may decide t o censor or promote certain works (compare Lefevere's
discussion of control factors in section % I ) , the groups and social institu-
tions to which Venuti refers would include the various players in the publish-
ing industry as a whole. Above all, these urould be the publishers and editors
who choose the works and commission the translations, pay the translators
and often dictate the translation method. They also include the literary
agents, marketing and sales teams and reviewers. The reviewers' comments
indicate and to some extent determine how translations are read and received
in the target culture. Each of these players has a particular position and role
lvithin the dominant cultural a k T - ; ; ; l z g e n d a s of their --time a n d place.
--
I-..~
1-- ,. i-------
 146 TRANSLATING THE FOREIGN
II
The translators themselves are part of that culture, which they can either
accept or rebel against.
9.1.1 Venuti and the 'invisibility' of the translator
Invisibility is a term used by Venuti (1995: 1) 'to describe the translator's
situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture'. Venuti sees
this invisibility as typically being produced:
1 by the way translators themselves tend t o translate 'fluently' into Eng-
lish, to produce an idiomatic and 'readable' TT, thus creating an 'illusion
of transparency';
2 by the way the translated texts are typically read in the target culture:
A translated text, whether prose or poetry, tict~onor non-hction, is judged
acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently,
when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem
transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer's personal,
ity or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text -the appearance,
in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the
'original'.
(Venuti 1995: 1)
Venuti (1998: 3 1) sees the most important factor for this as being 'the prevail-
ing conception of authorship'. Translation is seen as derivative and of sec-
ondary quality and importance. Thus, the English practice since D r y d m has
been t o conceal the act of translation so that, even now, 'translations are
rarely considered a form of literary scholarship' (Venuti 1998: 32). "
9.1.2 Domestication and foreignization
Venuti (1995: 19-20) discusses invisibility hand in hand with two types of
translating strategy: domestication and foreignization. These strategies con-
cern both the choice of text to translate and the translation method. Their
roots are traced back by Venuti t o ~chleiermacherand his 1813 essay 'Uber
die verschiedenen Methoden des ~b6rsetzen.s'(see chapter 2). Venuti (1995:
21) sees domestication as dominating Anglo-American translation culture.
Just as the postcolonialists are alert t o the cultural effects of the differential
in power relations between colony and ex-colony, so Venuti (1995: 20)
bemoans the phenomenon of domestication since it involves 'an ethno-
c e n t r ~ creduct~ono t the foreign text to [Anglo-American] target-language
values'. This entails translating in a transparent, fluent. 'inv~sible:
Fstyle in order to minimize the foreignness of the TT. Venuti allies it with
Schleiermacher's description of translation that 'leaves the reader in peace,
as much as possible, and moves the author towards him' (Schleiermacher
181311992: 41-2; see chapter 2 of this book). Domestication. further - adds (pp. 18-19) that some of the reviews attacked the translation for not
covers adherence t o domestic literary canons by carefully selecting the
-- - texts
- ..-
CULTURAL AND POLITICAL AGENDA 147
that are likely to lend themselves t o such a translation strategy (Venuti 1997:
?, , 4 ,
o n the other hand, 'entails choosing a foreign text
developing a translation method along lines which are excluded bv dominant
cultural values in the target language',(Venuti 1997: 242). It is the preferred
whose description is of a translation strategv
where 'the translator leaves the writer alone, as much as possible and moves
reader towards t k w r ; r r i (Schleiermacher 181311992: 42). Venuti (1995:
considers the foreignizing
cultural! values t o register the
e n c m e foreign text, sending the
'to restrain the ethnocentric violence of t r a n s l l t u
i o : w o r d s , n the 'v&rlvl domrstica-
;i
7
ting cultural values of the English-language world. The foreignizing method
of translating, a strategy Venuti also terms 'resistancy' (1995: 305-6), is a
,.
non-fluent or estranging translation style designed to make visible the pres-
ence of the translator by highlighting the foreign identity of the ST and
protecting it from the ideological dominance of the target culture.
In his later book The Scandals of Translation (1998), Venuti continues to
insist o n foreignizing or, as he also calls it, 'minoritizing' translation, to
cultivate a varied and 'heterogeneous discourse' (Venuti 1998: 11). O n e of
the examples he gives of a minoritizing project is his own translation of
works by the nineteenth-century Italian Tarchetti (pp. 13-20). The choice
of works to translate is minoritizing since Tarchetti was a minor nineteenth-
century Italian writer, a Milanese bohemian who further challenged the liter-
ary establishment by using the standard Tuscan dialect to write experimental
and Gothic novels and by challenging the moral and political values of the
day. As far as the language is concerned, the minoritizing or foreignizing
method of Venuti's translation comes through in the deliberate inclusion of
foreignizing elements, such as modern American slang, in a bid to make the
translator 'visible' and t o make the readers realize they are reading a transla-
tion of a work from a foreign culture. Venuti gives the extract shown in box
9.1 as an example of what he means by this approach.
Among the elements of this extract which Venuti considers to be distinct-
ive of foreignization are the close adherence to the ST structure and syntax
(e.g. the adjunct positions in the first sentence), the calques soggiorno as
sojourn, indz~rloas induce him and the archaic structure nor could I ever. In
other passages (see Venuti 1998: 16-17), he juxtaposes both archaisms (e.g.
"
scapegrace) and modern colloquialisms (e.g. con artist, funk), and uses British
spellings (e.g. demeanour, offence) to jar the reader with a 'heterogeneous
discourse'.
Venuti is happy to note (1998: 15) that some of the reviews of the transla-
tion were appreciative of his 'visible' translating strategy. However, he also
being what, in Venuti's terms, would be domestication.