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 intechnical translation (viz. fluency)

It has traditionally been the field where innovativetheories 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 bypublishers, 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

Assessment of Venuti’s model