Venutis Translation Theory of Domestication Foreignization Who is

Venuti’s Translation Theory of Domestication & Foreignization

Ø Who is Lawrence Venuti? q Lawrence Venuti (b. 1953) is a professional translator (mostly from Italian), translation theorist, and educator. q He is the editor of Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992) and The Translation Studies Reader (a selection of twentieth-century texts, from Benjamin to Venuti himself; 2000). q He is the author of the influentially polemical book ‘The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), in which he strenuously argues against the notion of neutrality in translation, basing his argument on a historical account of developments from the seventeenth century to the present as well as of ‘The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference’ (1998).

Ø What is Venuti’s Concept of Translation? q Translation for Venuti is ‘the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language reader’. q This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but whatever divergence the translation conveys will be imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. q Venuti views the translation act as an act of violence. The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist it in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. For example, if the translation is culturally sensitive (a taboo (homosexuality for instance) in the target language culture), that will make it marginal and not widely spread one. q Thus, the violent effects of translation are felt at home as well as abroad. On the one hand, translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities foreign cultures and hence can play a role in racial and ethnic conflicts and geopolitical confrontations. q The violence wreaked by translation is partly inevitable, inherent in the translation process, partly potential, emerging at any point in the production and reception of the translated text, varying with specific cultural and social formations at different historical moments.

Ø Invisibility & Visibility of the Translator: q The notion of translator’s invisibility, as opposed to visibility, is introduced by Venuti (Venuti 1995: 1 -2). By invisibility, he means that translators tend to hide their voices, thus producing a 'fluent' piece of translation by avoiding “any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities” that make “it seem transparent”). To put this differently, the TT sounds as if it were not a 'translation', but rather the 'original'. By contrast, visibility, according to Venuti, refers to that type of translation in which translators, whether deliberately or not, leave their fingerprint in the TT, thus producing a piece of work full of linguistic and stylistic features that strike the TL reader as marked and unusual. Having traced back a distinction between two translation methods (namely, naturalizing and alienating) made by the German theologian and translator Friedrich Schleiermacher, Venuti argues that translation strategy can be either domesticating or foreignizing respectively. q Venuti links these two concepts to Schleiermacher’s two approaches where “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him ( i. e. alienating/foreignizing) or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him”, (i. e. naturalizing/domesticating), . q The terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ indicate fundamentally ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture, ethical effects produced by the choice of a text for translation and by the strategy devised to translate it, whereas the terms like ‘fluency’ and ‘resistancy’ indicate fundamentally discursive features of translation strategies in relation to the reader’s cognitive processing. q Domestication and foreignization are considered to be not binary opposites but part of a continuum.