Lawrence Venuti: Anglo-saxon Conventions, Violence and Translation
http://www.temple.edu/newsroom/2009_2010/02/stories/Venuti.htm
“Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures,” says Venuti...
Comments
Also up today: a longer conversation with Venuti about Edward Hopper, among other things; it's the first in the Reading the World podcast series from Three Percent: http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2475
Jess A., February 4, 2010, 9:54a.m.
Use of the word "violence" in this kind of literary discussion always strikes me as uncomfortably hyperbolic. But I do appreciate the point being made.
jed, February 4, 2010, 6:24p.m.
I think we have to consider it in comparison with the ethnocentric violence of not translating.
Lucas, February 5, 2010, 2:59p.m.
This seems to me to call for a kind of 'literary translation' market -- aimed towards people who are willing to engage prose that is unfamiliar/resistant/hard to read. The question is whether those readers exist? Will anyone sit there while translators experiment with ways to postpend resultative compliments?
sherl, February 7, 2010, 4:55p.m.
Of all the translator-inflicted forms of violence, I think that over-exoticization is far more bestial than hyper-homogenization. We need to be creative, certainly, and invent where invention is called for (where it is determined by the author and the text, that is, and not by the translator's own academic milieu or aspirations), but if we de-familiarize the text to the point that it strips an author and his/her characters of their fundamental humanity, transforms them into indecipherable or (gulp, gag) inscrutable beings, then I think we've failed horribly at our jobs. Venuti's words and works are thought-provoking, but I'm not sure they're all that relevant to what so many of us are trying to do: to translate the humanity of 1.3 billion Chinese people to a privileged western audience that isn't that willing, or able, or inclined, to listen. To get people to listen, you have to speak their language. And mainland Chinese authors are constantly being drowned out, not by homogenization, but by other forms of white noise: the interference of censors, the depredations of the market and over 60 years of cold-war mentality on all invested sides.
Cindy Carter, February 9, 2010, 6:11p.m.
While Venuti seems to be coming from an ethic of multiculturalism, to me his theoretical view is limited by its own eurocentricism. Foreignizing between Italian and English is one thing, but too much foreignization of a Chinese text in English can essentialize cultural difference with a kind of Charlie Chan-speak. Which is to say, I agree with you, Cindy.
Lucas, February 11, 2010, 9:10p.m.
There's a fun comment thread about this article on LanguageHat.
jdmartinsen, February 20, 2010, 8:35a.m.
Holy crap, that's an awesome thread. Any series of comments that makes you laugh out loud and makes you add books to your Amazon wishlist deserves stickying.
Eric Abrahamsen, February 21, 2010, 4:01p.m.