The turns of the 1990s 145

suit their new surroundings. These are a more recent phenomenon, “striking
back” at the “Empire of English” and steadily gaining territory of their own.

4.3 Venuti’s foreignization: a new paradigm?

The topic of the global domination of English today links up with a notion that
developed into a household word in literary Translation Studies during the 1990s,
and at the same time it takes us back full circle to our point of departure: Schleier-
macher and the German Romantic Age (see 1.1) as presented in English by André
Lefevere (1977). We may recall that in this version the two “roads” open to
Schleiermacher’s “genuine translator” were described as follows:
Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves
the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and
moves the author towards him. (Lefevere 1977: 74)
Lawrence Venuti (1991, but especially 1995) takes up Schleiermacher’s dichotomy
as a central issue and draws the following conclusions:
Admitting (with qualifications like “as much as possible”) that translation can
never be completely adequate to the foreign text, Schleiermacher allowed the
translator to choose between a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction
of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back
home, and a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant presure on those values to
register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the
reader abroad. (1995: 20, emphasis added)
The German dichotomy of Verfremdung (moving the reader towards the author)
and Entfremdung (moving the author towards the reader), discussed by Vermeer
as “verfremdendes” (alienating) and “angleichendes” (assimilating) translation
(Vermeer 1994a), have been rendered here as a “foreignizing” and a “domesticat-
ing” method, and as such they have now become standard terminology in English
Translation Studies. However, while Schleiermacher certainly made it clear that he
preferred moving the reader towards the author, there is nothing in his lecture to
indicate that the one method involved evaluations such as “ethnodeviant pressure”
versus “ethnocentric reduction” – recognizable as the language of an English-
speaking intellectual of the outgoing 20th century. Venuti even intensifies his tone:
I want to suggest that insofar as foreignizing translation seeks to restrain the eth-
nocentric violence of translation, it is highly desirable today, a strategic cultural
intervention in the current state of world affairs, pitched against the hegemonic
English-language nations and the unequal cultural exchanges in which they
engage their global others. Foreignizing translation in English can be a form of
146 The Turns of Translation Studies

resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperial-

ism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations. (1995: 20)
The notion of “foreignizing translation” is thus made to fit into the framework and
context of late 20th century translation ethics, as seen from a specifically Anglo-
American perspective. Apart from Lefevere, a further “mediator” between the
thinking of Schleiermacher and Venuti was the French theorist Antoine Berman,
in particular his book on German Romanticism L’Épreuve de l’Étranger: Culture et
traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique (The trial of the foreign: Culture and
translation in Romantic Germany) (Berman 1984, see too Berman 2000). The
result, as Marilyn Gaddis Rose aptly put it, was that “norms of the American criti-
cism vanguard turned to Continental philosophy, especially German hermeneu-
tics as filtered through French poststructuralism” (1996: 62). From this
perspective Venuti writes his “history of translation”, whereby “foreignizing”
translations (e.g. Newman’s Homer) are judged as being fundamentally good, and
“domesticating” ones (i.e. “fluent” translations making the translator “invisible”, as
in Matthew Arnold’s Homer) are seen to be fundamentally bad. As the emotive
terms “ethnocentric violence”, “racism”, “narcissism” and “imperialism” indicate,
Venuti’s language is often provocative and polarizing: in his view (in contrast to
Vermeer), “domestication” exerts violence on the source culture.
In the basic message he wants to get across Venuti is certainly justified. His
actual topic is the unfavourable position of (literary) translators in the Anglo-
American world (including copyright legislation and inadequate pay), and he
points out that by creating fluent and idiomatic English versions (“domesticated”
translations, in fact), they remain “invisible” and repress the foreign element in the
source text.62 Venuti pleads for the translator’s visibility through foreignation, as
by using archaic terms or idiosyncratic word-order that preserve the “foreignness”
of the source text (whether this really produces the desired effect is another issue).
This too must however be understood in the context of the hegemony of English
in the modern globalized world (4.2.3), and Venuti has a strong case where his
demands refer specifically to the Anglo-American market. But his wording is fun-
damental and generalizing, as against his “history of translation”, which, as Pym
aptly points out, is selective and highly coloured:
The best thing about Venuti’s guided tour of English-language translators and the-
orists is that most of them are tagged with notes on their political connections,
religious beliefs and occasional dalliances. All the bad ones are associated with lib-
eral humanism, imperialism, sexism and/or individualism. The few good ones

62. This may explain Venuti’s attitude to Helen Lowe-Porter discussed in 3.3.
 The turns of the 1990s 147

generally oppose such nasties, in the same way as they oppose fluent translations.
(1996: 172)
Nonetheless, since Venuti’s book appeared in 1995 the controversy of domestica-
tion vs. foreignization has taken a central position in the English-speaking Trans-
lation Studies debate. The two notions have spread like memes in Chesterman’s
sense, as attributed to Venuti, and have largely lost contact with Schleiermacher
and the world of German Romanticism – a very different one from the world
today. As we saw above (1.1), Schleiermacher himself stressed the importance of
understanding an author “through the prism of his nationality and the age in
which he lives” (Rübberdt and Salevsky 1997: 302). This applies, not only to his
two “methods of translation”, but also to other terms such as “half-breeds”
(Blendlinge) or “nation”, which were used from the viewpoint of the early 19th cen-
tury and cannot be judged according to the criteria of our modern world. It is sig-
nificant too that Venuti’s ideas are most cogently disputed where English is not the
target language and the target culture is not Anglo-American, as has been shown
by Paloposki and Oittinen (2000) for translations into Finnish (see too Tymoczko
1999). And this is precisely the point: despite his own theory, Venuti has as it were
subjected Schleiermacher’s notions to an ethnocentric reduction (or cannibaliza-
tion?) and – as a translator all too visible – “domesticated” them to suit the Anglo-
American planetary consciousness of the outgoing 20th century. As such this is
cannot be called a new paradigm, but rather evolves new notions from old con-
cepts, and these – despite a fundamental, if not universal claim – refer to the spe-
cific situation of the “hegemonic English-language nations” of today. In
challenging the hegemonic role of English, the position of translators and the con-
ditions of their work, Venuti is absolutely justified – but the solution to all these
problems does not lie merely in “foreignizing” translations. For the cross-cultural
communication of today, Schleiermacher’s maxim, which was used for the schol-
ars of the time with reference to translating from Classical Antiquity, is simply
inadequate.
If we consider the examples of literary prose discussed above, the brief passage
from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (3.2.1) and the excerpt from Amy Tan’s The Joy
Luck Club (3.3.1) in German translation, also the opening lines of Der Zauberberg
(3.3) in English translation, we see that “fluency” and an ensuing “invisibility” of
the translator was not the real problem. In Rushdie’s own hybrid text the English
had already been “foreignized” at various levels, the “norm” of the English lan-
guage already creatively extended in Coseriu’s sense to exploit the language poten-
tial; similarly Amy Tan creates English structures to reflect the use of Chinese
speech as against the same speaker’s faulty English. Both the German translations
are formally correct, but wooden and one-dimensional rather than fluent. Because
148 The Turns of Translation Studies

of this the dialogue in particular does not match the individual characters of the
two speakers concerned, and it is the ensuing incoherence that makes the text “vis-
ible” as a translation and presents the basic problem. As was already established
with the first few lines of Lowe-Porter’s The Magic Mountain, they focus on con-
tent at the expense of the inner structuring of the text. Strategies for giving expres-
sion to these structures could well have been developed, but, as may have emerged
from the passages discussed here, they would certainly go beyond merely “for-
eignizing” the language of the translation.