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CAPITOLO 9 MUNDAY
The role of the translator
Visibility, ethics and sociology
9.1 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. Thus he contests Toury’s ‘scientific’ descriptive model with its aim of producing ‘value- free’ norms and laws of translation. In addition to governments and other politically motivated institutions, which may decide to censor or promote certain works, the groups and social institutions to which Venuti refers would include the various players in the publishing industry as a whole. Above all, these would 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 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.
9.1.1 Venuti and the ‘invisibility’ of the translator
The Translator’s Invisibility (1995/2008) draws on Venuti’s own experience as a translator of experimental Italian poetry and fiction. Invisibility is a term he uses ‘ to describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary British and American cultures ’ (Venuti 2008: 1). Venuti sees this i nvisibility as typically being produced: (1) by the way translators themselves tend to translate ‘fluently’ into English, 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, fiction or nonfiction, 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 personality 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 sees the most important factor for this as being ‘the prevailing conception of authorship’. Translation is seen as derivative and of secondary quality and importance. Thus, English-language practice since Dryden has been to 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 discusses invisibility hand in hand with two types of translation : domestication and foreignization. These practices^1 concern both the choice of text to trans- late and the translation method. 1- Venuti sees domestication as dominating British and American translation culture. So Venuti bemoans the phenomenon of domestication since it involves ‘an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving 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. 2- On the other hand, foreignization ‘entails choosing a foreign text and devel- oping a translation method along lines which are excluded by dominant cultural values in the target language’ (ibid.: 242). It is the preferred choice of Schleiermacher, whose description is of a translation strategy where ‘the translator leaves the writer in peace, as much as possible and moves the reader toward [the writer]’ Venuti follows this and considers foreignizing practices to be a ‘highly desirable... strategic cultural intervention’ which seek to ‘ send the reader abroad’ by making the receiving culture aware of the linguistic and cultural difference inherent in the foreign text. This is to be achieved by a non-fluent, estranging or heterogeneous translation style designed to make visible the presence of the translator and to highlight the foreign identity of the ST. This is a way, Venuti says, to counter the unequal and ‘violently’ domesticating cultural values of the English-language world.
- (^) looking at how many books are translated and sold, which ones are chosen and into which languages, and how trends vary over time;
- (^) looking at the kind of translation contracts that are made and how ‘visible’ the translator is in the final product;
- (^) seeing how literally ‘visible’ the fact of translation is, looking at the packaging of the text, the appearance or otherwise of the translator’s name on the title page, the copyright assignation, translators’ prefaces, correspondence, etc.;
- (^) analysing the reviews of a translation, author or period. The aim would be to see what mentions are made of the translators (are they ‘visible’?) and by what criteria reviewers (and the literary ‘élite’) judge translations at a given time and in a given culture.
-Antoine Berman: the ‘negative analytic’ of translation
Questions of how much a translation assimilates a foreign text and how far it signals difference had already attracted the attention of the noted French theorist, the late Antoine Berman , preceded and influenced Venuti. Berman (ibid.: 240) describes translation as an épreuve (‘experience’/‘trial’) in two senses:
- (1) for the target culture in experiencing the strangeness of the foreign text and word;
- (2) for the foreign text in being uprooted from its original language context. Berman deplores the general tendency to negate the foreign in translation by the translation strategy of ‘naturalization’, which would equate with Venuti’s later ‘domestication’. ‘
The properly ethical aim of the translating act’, says Berman , is ‘receiving the Foreign as Foreign’, which would seem to have influenced Venuti’s ‘foreignizing’ translation strategy at the time. However, Berman considers that there is generally a ‘system of textual deformation’ in TTs that prevents the foreign from coming through. His examination of the forms of deformation is termed ‘negative analytic’ : The negative analytic is primarily concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free writing), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised. His main attention is centred on the translation of fiction: The principal problem of translating the novel is to respect its shapeless polylogic and avoid an arbitrary homogenization. By this, Berman is referring to the linguistic variety and creativity of the novel and the way translation tends to reduce variation. He identifies twelve ‘deforming tendencies’: (1) Rationalization: This mainly entails the modification of syntactic struc- tures including punctuation and sentence structure and order. An example would be translations of Dostoevsky which remove some of the repetition and simplify complex sentence structures.
- Clarification: This includes explicitation, which ‘aims to render “clear” what does not wish to be clear in the original. - Expansion: Like other theorists, Berman says that TTs tend to be longer than STs. This is due to ‘empty’ explicitation that unshapes its rhythm, to ‘overtranslation’ and to ‘flattening’. These additions only serve to reduce the clarity of the work’s ‘voice’. - Ennoblement: This refers to the tendency on the part of certain translators to ‘improve’ on the original by rewriting it in a more elegant style. The result, according to Berman (ibid.: 246), is an annihilation of the oral rhetoric and formless polylogic of the ST. Equally destructive is the opposite – a TT that is too ‘popular’ in its use of colloquialisms. - Qualitative impoverishment: This is the replacement of words and expressions with TT equivalents ‘that lack their sonorous richness or, corre- spondingly, their signifying or “iconic” features’ (ibid.: 247). By ‘iconic’,
The destruction of expressions and idioms: Berman considers the replacement of an idiom or proverb by its TL ‘equivalent’ to be an ‘ethnocentrism’: ‘to play with “equivalence” is to attack the discourse of the foreign work’, he says (ibid.: 251). Thus, an English idiom from Joseph Conrad containing the name of the well-known London mental health hospital Bedlam ,^3 should not be translated by Charenton , a similar French institution, since this would result in a TT that produces a new network of French cultural references. The effacement of the superimposition of languages: By this, Berman means the way translation tends to erase traces of different forms of language that co- exist in the ST. These may be the mix of American English and varieties of Latin American Spanish in the work of new Latino/a writers, the blends of Anglo- Indian writing, the proliferation of language influences in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake , different sociolects and idiolects, and so on. Berman considers this to be the ‘central problem’ in the translation of novels. Counterbalancing the ‘universals’ of this negative analytic is Berman’s ‘positive analytic’ , his proposal for the type of translation required to render the foreign in the TT. This he calls ‘literal translation’ : Here ‘literal’ means: attached to the letter (of works). Labor on the letter in translation, on the one hand, restores the particular signifying process of works (which is more than their meaning) and, on the other hand, transforms the translating language. Berman’s term is markedly different and more specific compared to the conven- tional use of ‘literal translation’ discussed in Chapter 2; his use of ‘literal’ and ‘letter’ and his reference to the ‘signifying process’ point to a Saussurean perspective and to a positive transformation of the TL. How exactly this is to be done, however, depends on the creativity and innovation of the translator in his search for truth. Berman’s work is important in linking philosophical ideas to translation stra- tegies with many examples drawn from existing translations. His discussion of the ethics of translation as witnessed in linguistic ‘deformation’ of TTs is of especial relevance and a notable counterpoint to earlier writing on literary translation. But ethics also encompasses the context of translation and those professionals (translators, publishers, reviewers.. .) whom Lefevere described (see section 8.1).
9.2 The position and positionality of the translator
Venuti’s ‘call to action’ (2008: 265–77), for translators to adopt ‘visible’ and ‘foreignizing’ practices. Translators also often consider that their work is intuitive, that they must be ‘led’ by language and listen to their ‘ear’. In similar vein, Margaret Sayers Peden, the translator of Latin American authors Sábato, Fuentes, Allende and Esquivel, listens to the ‘voice’ of the ST. She defines this as ‘the way something is communicated: the way the tale is told; the way the poem is sung’ and it determines ‘all choices of cadence and tone and lexicon and syntax’ (1987: 9). The stance and positionality of the translator have become much more central in translation studies. Chapter 8 described some of the forms in which translation is manipulated by the ideology of the sociocultural context. T]he ideology of a translation resides not simply in the text translated, but in the voicing and stance of the translator, and in the relevance to the receiving audience. These latter features are affected by the place of enunciation of the translator: indeed they are part of what we mean by the ‘place’ of enunciation, for that ‘place’ is an ideological positioning as well as a geographical or temporal one. These aspects of a translation are motivated and determined by the translator’s cultural and ideological affiliations as much as or even more than by the temporal and spatial location that the translator speaks from. Carol Maier (2007), herself both translator of Latin American literature and a translation studies theorist, names this positioning ‘intervenience’ and the translator ‘an intervenient being’. That this extends beyond the literary to include tech- nical, volunteer and other forms of translation is also evident from the volume devoted to translator activism , co-edited by Boéri and Maier (2010), part of what Wolf (2012) sees as the ‘activist turn’ in sociological approaches to translation.
9.3 The sociology and historiography of translation
Many studies have drawn on the work of French ethnographer and sociolo- gist Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1991) and his concepts of:
- (^) field of social activity, which is the site of a power struggle between partici- pants or agents – for us, this field is translation and the participants poten- tially include the author, commissioner, publisher, editor, translator, and reader;
and that the main concern is that the translation should ‘read well’ in the TL (Munday 2008). In some cases, the power play may result in the ST author’s omission from the translation process altogether. There is a range of other agents playing key roles in the preparation, dissem- ination and fashioning of translations. These include commissioners, mediators, literary agents, text producers, translators, revisers and editors. The volume edited by Milton and Bandia (2009) provides detailed examples of such cultural ‘gate- keepers’ , to use Bourdieu’s term, whose work has been innovative either stylistically or politically.
9.5 The reception and reviewing of translations
The link between the workings of the publishing industry and the reception of a given translation is clearly made in Meg Brown’s in-depth study of Latin American novels published in West Germany in the 1980s. She stresses (Brown 1994: 58) the role of reviews in informing the public about recently published books and in preparing the readership for the work. Brown adopts ideas from reception theory , including examining the way a work conforms to, challenges or disappoints the readers’ aesthetic ‘horizon of expectation’. This is a term employed by Jauss (1982: 24) to refer to readers’ general expectations (of the style, form, content, etc.) of the genre or series to which the new work belongs. One way of examining the reception is by looking at the reviews of a work, since they represent a ‘body of reactions’ to the author and the text (Brown 1994: 7) and form part of the sub-area of translation criticism in Holmes’s ‘map’. Reviews are also a useful source of information concerning that culture’s view of translation itself, as we saw in section 9.1.2, where This links in with Venuti’s observations (2008: 2–3) that most English-language reviews prefer ‘fluent’ translations written in modern, general, standard English that is ‘natural’ and ‘idiomatic’ There is no set model for the analysis of reviews in translation, although the whole gamut of paratexts (devices appended to the text) is the subject of the cultural theorist Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1997).^5 Genette considers two kinds of paratextual elements: (1) peritexts ; and (2) epitexts.
- (1) Peritexts appear in the same location as the text and are provided by the author or publisher. Examples given by Genette (ibid.: 12) are titles,
sub- titles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, prefaces, epilogues and framing elements such as the cover and blurb.
- An epitext ‘is any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space’ (ibid.: 344). Examples are marketing and promo- tional material, which may be provided by the publisher, correspondence on the text by the author, and also reviews and academic and critical discourse on the author and text which are written by others. The paratext is ‘subordi- nate’ to the text (ibid.: 12) but it is crucial in guiding the reading process. For example, a reader who first encounters a review of a book will approach the text itself with certain preconceptions based on that epitext. If we addi- tionally adopt the analytical approach of reception theory (Jauss 1982), we can analyse reviews synchronically or diachronically. An example of a synchronic analysis would be an examination of a range of reviews of a single work; examples of a diachronic analysis would be an examination of reviews of books of an author or newspaper over a longer time period.
