CAPITOLO 9
translating the foreign: the (in)visibility of translation
Venuti:the cultural and political agenda of translation
Venuti insists that the scope of translation studies needs to be broadened to take account of
the value-driven nature of the sociocultural framework. 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 within the dominant cultural and
political agendas of their time and place.The translators themselves are part of that culture,
which they can either accept or rebel against.
Venuti and the 'invisibility' of the translator
Invisibility is a term used by Venuti 'to describe the translator's situation and activity in
contemporary Anglo-American culture'.
The invisibility depends on :
1 the way translators tend to translate an idiomatic and 'readable' TT,creating an 'illusion of
transparency';
2 by the way the translated texts are read in the target culture: A translated text, is judged
acceptable when it reads fluently.
Derivative and of secondary quality and importance.
Domestication and foreignization
Venuti discusses invisibility hand in hand with two types of translating strategy:
domestication and foreignization.
Venuti sees domestication as dominating Anglo-American translation culture. bemoans the
phenomenon of domestication since it involves 'an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text
to Anglo-American] target-language cultural values'. This entails translating in a transparent,
fluent, 'invisible style in order to minimize the foreignness of the TT.
Domestication further covers adherence to domestic literary canons by carefully selecting
the texts that are likely to lend themselves to such a translation strategy.
Foreignization, 'entails choosing a foreign text and developing a translation method along
lines which are excluded by dominant cultural values in the target language'. 'the translator
leaves the writer alone, as much as possible and moves the reader towards the writer'.
In other words, the foreignizing method can restrain the 'violently' domestica- ting cultural
values of the English-language world. The foreignizing method also terms 'resistancy', is a
designed to make visible the presence of the translator of the ST.
According to Venuti the terms may change meaning across time and location.
Antoine Berman: the negative analytic of translation
Berman considers that there is generally a system of textual deformation in TTs that
prevents the foreign coming through. His main attention is centered on the translation of
fiction: the principal problem of translating the novel is to respect its shapeless poly logic and
avoid an arbitrary homogenization.
1 Rationalization : effect synthetic structures including sentence structure and order.
2 Clarification/explication
3 Expansion: target texts tend to be longer than source texts.
4 Ennoblement: the tendency on the part of certain translators to improve on the original by
rewriting it in a more elegant Style.
