Lingua inglese III - i translation studies

Toury and Descriptive Translation Studies

For Toury, translations occupy a position in the social and literary system of the target culture. With this approach, he follows the polysystem theory. Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) consist of a description of the product and the role of the sociocultural system:

1. Situate the text within the target culture system
2. Compare the source text (ST) and target text (TT)
3. The definition of norms used by Toury is "translation general values or ideas shared by a community (what is wrong or right) into performance instruction for applicable situations."

Toury considers translation to be an activity governed by norms. For him, the norms can be reconstructed from two types of sources:

1. From examination of the text: through which we need to understand the relationship between ST and TT segments.
2. From the statements made about norms by translator publishers...

Toury sees different kinds of norms operating at different stages of the translation process. The initial norm refers to general choices.

Involvement of literary tendencies within the target cultural system in the production of any translated text.

The integration of both the original text and translated text.

The main critic to the Toury's work is:

• The two Toury's laws are contradictory. In fact, the law of standardization is TL oriented and the law of interference is ST oriented.

Chesterman's Translation Norms:

Chesterman proposes another set of norms:

• Product or expectancy norms concerning what a translation should be like. The readers should have a notion of what is an appropriate translation.
• Professional norms regulate the process itself. In particular, there are the ethical norms through which the translator will accept responsibility for the work produced for the commissioner and the reader. Social norms ensure that the translator should assure communication between the parties. Linguistic norms deal with the relation between the ST and TT.

Lambert and Van Gorp (they are in contradiction with Toury and...

(Even-Zohar)They accept that is impossible to summarize all relationship involved in the activity of translation but suggest a systematic scheme that avoids superficial and intuitive commentaries and judgements and convictions.

Chapter 8

Varieties of cultural studies

Bassnett and Lefevere go beyond language and focus on the interaction between translation between translations and culture, on the way in which culture impacts and constraints translation and on the larger issue of context, history and convention.

Lefevere

The people involved in such power positions are the ones Lefevere sees as rewriting literature and governing its consumption by the general public.

The motivation for such rewriting can be ideological or poetological. He claims that "the same basic process of rewriting is a work in translation, historiography, onthologization, criticism and editing.

He said "translation is the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting and ... it is potentially the most influential."

The most important consideration is the ideological one. The poetological consideration refers to the dominant poetics in the target language culture. Simon She’s approaches translation from a gender studies angle. She sees a language of sexism in translation studies, with its image of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness and betrayal (tradimento). Simon paint out that the classicism of Russian literature were initially made available in English in translations produced mainly by one woman (ex. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy).

Post colonial translation theory Spivak’s view is often expressed in “translationese” which eliminates the identity of politically less powerful individuals and cultures. Spivak’s critique of western feminism and publishing is most biting when she suggests that feminists from the egemonic countries should show solidarity with woman.

In postcolonial contexts, one way to understand the experiences of women is by learning the language in which they speak and write.

Another important postcolonial movement in translation comes from Brazil, specifically from the famous story of the ritual cannibalization of a Portuguese bishop by native Brazilians. This movement is based on the metaphor of anthropophagy or cannibalism, as described in Andrade's "Manifesto Antropofago". The metaphor has been used by the strong Brazilian translation studies community to represent the experience of colonization and translation. In this metaphor, the colonizers and their language are devoured, their life force invigorating the devourers, but in a new purified and energized form that is appropriate to the needs of the native peoples.

In the Irish context, Cronin focuses on the role of translation in the linguistic and political battle between the Irish and English languages. He examines how Irish translators have discussed and presented their work in prefaces, commentaries, and other writings.

He uses the metaphor of Translation to draw a parallel with what was happening physically to the Irish (translation at a cultural level)

Chapter 9

Translating the foreign: the (in)visibility of translation

Venuti: Domestication and Foreignization

Lawrence Venuti is a cultural theorist who influenced the nature of the translation. In particular he focused his attention on what he calls "Invisibility of the translator". Venuti argued that in Anglo-American culture the translators tend to translate the texts in a "fluent" way in order to make an easy-readable Target Text and giving the text an illusion of transparency, this kind of behavior, nevertheless, hide the original nature of foreign text deleting sometimes important elements.

Furthermore Venuti described two different methods to translate a text:

Domestication: In this method the translator is hidden, the text is adapted to the target culture minimizing the foreignness of the original text. The final result is a fluent

Text which give the reader the illusion that the text has been originally written in his language.

Foreignization: Is the Venuti's favourite way to work on a foreign text, in this case the translator tries to convey the TT reader all the impressions, the forms and the contents the writer wanted to communicate. This method brings out the work of the translator whose strategies are centred create a text which respect the original idea of the text even in a target language.

Despite his preference to the foreignization, Venuti highlight that the first method as the second one are not perfect models and that they were created to promote research in translation field.

Antoine Berman Berman's works had greatly influence on Venuti's theories. As Venuti he noted how the foreignness of the texts are given up for a major fluency on the TT. He invented a term which became afterward the Venuti's Domestication: Negative analytic.

In order to explain how many difficulties the translator

Meets translating a foreign text in a foreign-oriented way, Berman identifies twelve "Deforming tendencies" that show how a target culture-oriented translation can destroy the original features of a source text.

The publishing industry Venuti describes how the publishers tend to hide and influence the work of the translator, as the market requires fluent target texts, the publishers drive the translator to a more domesticating translation.

Another power element Venuti points out is the literary agent, the agents represent the writers and take a percentage of their profits, they help the translator offering to him the possibility to be published in other countries, but the more requested books are the ones which are easily assimilable in the target culture, so again the translation is modified.

Venuti speaks against the Anglo-American publishing, defining it as ethnocentric monolingual people who refuse the foreignness to aggressively preserve their own culture.

The reception and reviewing

The best way, in Venuti and Meg Brown opinion, to examine the reception of a translation is analyzing the reviews of a translated text. As Venuti noted the translation notes are the first overlooked when cuts are requested, the whole text is often considered by the review writers as a text written in their language completely leaving out the translator's work. Sometimes some Anglo-American review writers talk about a TT as if the text were been written by an English author, making comparisons with other Anglo-American texts.

Sometimes the writers of the reviews talk about the translation, judging it as inappropriate or less fluent often without having any knowledge in the field.

Chapter 10

Philosophical theories of translation

Steiner defines the Hermeneutic (the movements owes its origins to the German Romantics) Approach as "investigation of what it means to understand a piece of oral or written speech and diagnose the process". This investigation consist of 4

parts:

1. INITIATIVE TRUST (The translator's first move is a belief and trust that there is something in the source language that can be understood);
2. AGGRESSION (In a invasive move, like a slake. The translator invades, extracts and brings home);
3. INCORPORATION (Importing of the meaning of the foreign text can potentially dislocate or relocate the whole of the native structure);
4. CAMPENSATION (The meaning of source language leaves the original with a dialectically enigmatic residue);

Harvey talk about a theory contact to examine the way gay man and lesbian work within appropriate prevailing straight discourse from a range of communities.

Ezra Pound's work was very much influenced by his reading of the literature of the past, including Greek and Latin. In his translating, he sought to escape from