Lingua inglese III - Appunti

Translating the foreign: the (in)visibility of translation

Venuti insists that the scope of translation studies needs to be broadened (allargato) to take account of the value-driven nature of the sociocultural framework. He contests Toury's scientific descriptive model with its aim of producing value-free norms and laws of translation. The translators themselves are part of that culture, which they can accept or rebel against those norms.

Venuti discusses invisibility with two types of translation strategy: domestication and foreignization. These strategies concern both the choice of text to translate and the translation method. Venuti sees domestication as dominating Anglo-American translation culture. It 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 culture values.

The target language. Venuti considers the foreignization method to be an ethnodeviant pressure on values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad. The foreignization method of translating, a strategy called by Venuti "resistancy", is a non fluent translation style designed to make visible the presence of the translator by highlighting the foreign identity of the ST.

Berman's major theoretical work "l'épreuve de l'étranger et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique", precedes and influenced Venuti. His work represents a trial in two senses:

• A trial for the target culture in experiencing the strangeness of the foreign text and word
• A trial 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. His main attention is focused on

The translation of fiction, the principal problem in translating a novel is to respect its shapeless polylogic and avoid an arbitrary homogenization. Berman identified 12 deforming tendencies:

1. Rationalization: this mainly affects syntactic structures including punctuation and sentence structure.
2. Clarification
3. Expansion
4. Ennoblement
5. Qualitative impoverishment