Presentation of the book

The Translation Studies

Reader
by

Lawrence Venuti (2000)

London: Routledge, 524 pp.

Chronological sections
1900s-1930s
1940s-1950s
1960s-1970s
1980s
1990s

1900s-1930s Main trends

The main trends in translation theory during

this period are rooted in German literary and

philosophical traditions, in Romanticism,
hermeneutics, and existential
phenomenology. The assume that language
is not so much communicative as constitutive
in its representation of thought and reality,
and so translation is seen as an interpretation
which necessarily reconstitutes and transform
the foreign text.

1900s-1930s
Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator
Ezra Pound: Guidos relations
Jorge Luis Borges: The Translators of The

Thousand and one Nights

Jos Ortega y Gasset: The Misery and
Splendor of Translation

1940s-1950s Main trends

Translation theory during these decades is

dominated by the fundamental issue of

translatability. Influential figures in philosophy,
literary criticism, and linguistics all consider
whether translation can reconcile the differences
that separate languages and cultures
Translation methods are formulated with
precision
Trends vary widely between the extremes of
philosophical skepticism and practical
optimism

1940s-1950s
Vladimir Nabokov: Problems of translation:

Onegin in English
Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet: A
methodology for translation
Willard V.O. Quine: Meaning and Translation
Roman Jakobson: On Linguistic Aspects of
Translation

1960s-1970s Main trends

The controlling concept for most translation

theory during these decades is equivalence.

Translating is generally seen as a process of
communicating the foreign text by establishing a
relationship of identity or analogy with it
The literature on equivalence is
fundamentally normative, aiming to provide not
only analytical tools to describe translations, but
also standards to evaluate them. The universal is
then shaped to a local situation

1960s-1970s

Eugene Nida: Principles of Correspondence

J.C. Catford: Translation Shifts
Jiri Levy: Translation as a Decision Process
Katharina Reiss: Type, Kind and Individuality of Text:
Decision Making in Translation
James S. Holmes: The Name and Nature of Translation
Studies
George Steiner: The Hermeneutic Motion
Itamar Even-Zohar: The position of Translated Literature
within the Literary Polysystem
Gideon Toury: The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation

1980s Main Trends

Emergence of Translation Studies as a

separate discipline, overlapping with

linguistics, literary criticism, and philosophy,
but exploring unique problems of crosscultural communication
The most common theoretical assumption
during this period: the relative autonomy of
the translated text

1980s
Hans J. Vermeer: Skopos and Comission in Translational

Action
Andr Lefevere: Mother Courages Cucumbers: Text, System
and Refraction in a Theory of Literature
William Frawley: Prolegomenon to a Theory of Translation
Philip E. Lewis: The Measure of Translation Effects
Antoine Berman: Translation and the Trials of the Foreign
Shoshana Blum-Kulka: Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in
Translation
Lori Chamberlain: Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation

1990s Main Trends

In this decade, translation studies achieves a

certain institutional authority, manifested most

tangibly by a worldwide proliferation of translator
training programs and a flood of scholarly
publishing
At virtually the same time, another interdiscipline
emerges, cultural studies, and this brings a
renewed functionalism to translation theory, a
concern with the social effects of translation and
their ethical and political consequences

1990s
Annie Brisset: The Search for a Native Language:

Translation and Cultural Identity

Ernst-August Gutt: Translation as Interlingual
Interpretive use
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The Politics of Translation
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Thick Translation
Basil Hatim and Ian Mason: Politeness in Screen
Translating
Keith Harvey: Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities
and Cultural Transfer
Lawrence Venuti: Translation, Community, Utopia

Benjamin: Die Aufgabe des bersetzers

(1926)
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture

for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Is a translation meant for readers who do not
understand the original?
The relationship between content and language
is quite different in the original and the
translation. While content and language form a
certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its
skin, the language of the translation envelops its
content like a royal robe with ample folds.

The Task of the Translator

The task of the translator consists in finding

that intended effect [Intention] upon the

language into which he is translating which
produces in it the echo of the original.
The intention of the poet is spontaneous,
primary, graphic; that of the translator is
derivative, ultimate, ideational. For the great
motif of integrating many tongues into one
true language is at work.

 it is not the highest praise of a translation,

particularly in the age of its origin, to say that

it reads as if it had originally been written in
that language.
The basic error of the translator is that he
preserves the state in which his own
language happens to be instead of allowing
his language to be powerfully affected by the
foreign tongue.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972): Translating the poet

Guido Cavalcanti [1250 1300]
In the long run the translator is in all probability

impotent to do all of the work for the linguistically

lazy reader. He can show where the treasure
lies, he can guide the reader in choice of what
tongue is to be studied, and he can very
materially assist the hurried student who has a
smattering of a language and the energy to read
the original text alongside the metrical gloze.

From Cavalcantis Donna mi

Prega

Onde si move e donde nasce Amore

Qual suo proprio luogo, ovei dimora
Sustanza, o accidente, o ei memora?
E cagion docchi, o voler di cuore?
Say what is Love? Whence doth he start
Through what be his courses bent
Memory, substance, accident
A chance of eye or will of heart

Borges: The translators of The Thousand

and one Nights (1989)
The thousand and one Nights (XIII century)
Lane translated against Galland
Galland: good manners
Lane: Puritan qualms
Burton translated against Lane
Galland (trans. 1704)
Lane (trans. 1839)
Burton (trans. 1872)
Mardrus (trans. 1899): the most truthful

Vinay and Darbelnet: a methodology for

translation (1958)
Translators can choose from two methods of

translating:
Direct or literal translation
Oblique translation

Direct and Oblique Procedures

Direct translation:
1.Borrowing: chic (in French); dj vu (in English)
2.Calque: Science fiction
3. Literal translation: Where are you? O tes-vous?
Oblique translation:
4. Transposition: Ds son lever / As son as he gets
up
5. Modulation: It is not difficult to show / il est facile
de dmontrer
6. Equivalence: il pleut des cords / It is raining cats
and dogs
7. Adaptation: Le grand Meaulnes / The Wanderer

Quine: radical translation (1960)

Quine acknowledges that translating does in fact

occur on the basis of regulative maxims and

analytical hypothesis. And linguistics rely on
them to produce effective dictionaries, grammars
and manuals. Still, he argues that none of these
translating tools can guarantee a correlation
between stimulus and meaning.
.meaning is seen as conventionally, socially
circumscribed, and the foreign text is rewritten
according to the terms and values of the
receiving culture

Jakobson: On Linguistic Aspects of

Translation (1969)
Intralingual translation or rewording
Interlingual translation or translation proper
Intersemiotic translation or transmutation
Traduttore, traditore: The translator is a

betrayer
Translator of what messages?
Betrayer of what values?

Nida: Principles of Correspondence

(1964)
Differences in translations can generally, be

accounted for by three basic factors in

translating:

1. The nature of the message

2. The purpose or purposes of the author
3. The type of audience

Two different types of equivalence:

Formal: focuses on the message itself
Dynamic: based on the principle of equivalent
effect

Catford: Translation Shifts (1965)

Departures from formal correspondence in

the process of going from the SL (Source

Language) to the TL (Target Language)
Level Shifts: from grammar to lexis and
viceversa
Category Shifts: between sentences, clauses,
groups, words and morphemes

Jiri Levy: translation as a decision

process (1965)
From the teleological point of view, translation is

a process of communication.
From the point of view of the working situation
(that is from the pragmatic point of view)
translating is a DECISION PROCESS
Translation involves a gradual semantic
shifting as translators choose from a number of
possible solutions

Reiss: Type, Kind and Individuality of

Text. Decision Makind in translation
(1971)

Interlingual translation may be defined as a

bilingual mediated process of communication,

which ordinarily aims at the production of a
TL text that is functionally equivalent to an ST
text.
Changes affecting the translation:
Intentional
Unintentional

Basic Communicative form realized in

the concrete text (text type)
The communication of content: informative

type
The communication of artistically organized
content: expressive type
The communication of content with a
persuasive character: operative type

Holmes: The Name and Nature of

Translation Studies (1972)

Steiner: The Hermeneutic Motion

(1975)
The hermeneutic motion, the act of elicitation

and appropriative transfer of meaning is

fourfold:
Initiative Trust
Agression: incursive and extractive
Import of meaning and form: incorporative
Reciprocity: in order to restore balance

Itamar Even-Zohar :The Position of Translated

Literature within Literary polysystem (1975)
Even Zohar and Gideon Toury:

Literary translations are facts of the target

system
Literature is a polysystem of interrelated
forms and canons that constitute norms
constraining the translators choices and
strategies
Translated literature is a system in its own right

Gideon Toury: Norms in translation (1977)

The target orientation transforms the concept of

equivalence. The adequacy of a translation to

the source text becomes an unproductive line of
enquiry, not only because shifts alwys occur, but
because any determination of adequacy
involves the application of a target norm
Toury seeks to describe and explain the
acceptability of the translation in the receiving
culture
It is norms that determine the equivalence
manifested by actual translations

Translation Norms: an overview

Preliminary Norms: Translation policy
Operational Norms: Textual segmentation,

text type
Translational Norms:

Textual: the translated texts themselves

Extra-textual: semi-theoretical or critical
formulations, such as prescriptive theories of
translation, statements made by translators,
editors, publishers, and other persons
involved in or connected with the activity

Vermeer: Skopos and Commission in

Translational Action (1978 /1983 )
Target orientation associated with polysystem

theory.
The aim of any translational action, and the
mode in which it is to be realized, are negotiated
with the client who commissions the action.
The translator is the expert in translational
action. He is responsible for the performance of
th commissioned task, for the final translatum

One practical consequence of the

skopos theory:
a new concept of the status of the source

text for a translation

It is up to the translator to decide, for
instance, what role a source text plays in his
translational action.
The decisive factor here is the purpose, the
skopos, of the communication in a given
situation (Nord 1988:9)

Andr Lefevere: Text, system and

refraction in a theory of literature
Lefevere takes up the seminal work of Even-

Zohar and Toury and redefines their concepts of

literary system and norm.
He treates translation, criticism, editing, and
historiography as forms of refraction or
rewriting.
Refractions carry a work of literature over from
one system into another and they are determined
by such factors as patronage, poetics, and
ideology [manipulation]

Frawley: Prolegomenon to a Theory of

Translation (1984)
He questions the notion of equivalence as an

identity between foreign text and translation

If translating is a form of communication,
there is information only in difference, so that
a translation is actually a code in its own
right, setting its own standards and structural
presuppostions and entailments
Translation means recodification

Lewis: The measure of translation

effects (1980)
Use in translation:

1. To concentrate evaluative attention on moments

of density, and intensity where the play of
concepts and expression is affected by the
disruptive, disseminatory power of language
2. to insist on the transformations that the
translation carries out, not just on the semantic,
but also on syntactic and discursive levels
3. To ask whether the translation articulates on its
own textual effects that are consequentially and
tellingly abusive with respect to the original

Vers la traduction abusive

The translation will be essayistic, in the

strong sense of the word.

Commentary supplies the translation by doing
other than translation. In the wake of
translation the mission of commentary is to
translate in difference.

Berman: Translation and the Trials of

the Foreign
He questions ethnocentric translating that

deforms the foreign text by assimilating it to

the target language and culture
He describes the deforming tendencies
in translation which are largely
unconscious:
The textual analysis of translations can be
enriched through a psychoanalytical
approach

Deforming tendencies
1. Rationalization
2. Clarification
3. Expansion
4. Ennoblement and popularization
5. Qualitative impoverishement
6. Quantitative impoverishement
7. The destruction of rhythms

8. The destruction of underlying networks of

signification
9. The destruction of linguistic patternings
10. The destruction of vernacular networks or
their exotization
11. The destruction of expressions and idioms
12.The effacement of the superimposition of
languages

Blum-Kulka: shifts of cohesion and

coherence in translation (1986)
Discourse specific to translation: explicitation
Translating always increases the semantic

relations among the parts of the translated

text, establighing a greater cohesion through
explicitness, repetition, redundancy,
explanation and other discursive strategies.
She recommends empirical research in
reading patterns, psycholinguistic studies of
text processing.

Chamberlain: Gender and metaphorics

of translation (1988)
She focuses on gender metaphors that have recurred

in leading translation theorists since the seventeenth

century, demonstrating the enormous extent to which a
patriarchal model of authority has underwritten the
subordinate status of translation
She suggests her study might be productive for
translation studies in historical research that recovers
forgotten translating women, but also in translation
projects that are sensitive to ideologically coded foreign
writing, wether feminist or masculinist.

Brisset: Translation and cultural

identity (1996)
Translation does not fill a linguistic void.
Translation can, however, change the relation

of linguistic forces, at the institutional adn

symbolic levels, by making it possible for the
vernacular language to take the place of the
referential language.

Four types of language or subcode

1. A vernacular language: local, spoken
spontaneously, less appropriate for
communicating than for communing, and the
only language that can be considered to be the
mother tongue (or native language)
2. A vehicular language: national, regional, learned
out of necessity, to be used for communication in
the city

3. A referential language: tied to cultural, oral,

and written traditions, ensures continuity in
values by systematic reference to classic
works of the past
4. A mythical language: ultimate recourse,
verbal magic, whose incomprehensibility is
considered to be irrefutable proof of the
sacred

The task of the translation

The task of the translation is thus to replace

the language of the Other by a native

language. Not surprisingly, the native
language chosen is usually vernacular
Translation becomes an act of reclaiming of
recentering the identity, a reterritorialization
operation

Gutt: Translation as Interlingual

Interpretive use
He models translation on relevance theory:

Faithfulness in translation is a matter of

communicating an intended interpretation of the
foreign text through adequate contextual effects
that avoid unnecessary processing effort.
The degree to which the interpretation resembles
the foreign text and the means of expressing that
interpretation are determined by their relevance
to a target readership, their accessibility and
ease of processing.

When you want to inform someone about

eg. the contents of a lecture you might:
Try to summarize in a couple of sentences what

I consider to be the main points of the lecture

Try to give brief summaries of the main points fo
the lecture
Just say: It was about (the topic)
Pick out some particular topics of the talk, and
represent in some detail what he said about that,
possibly adding some explanations as well
Offer to let him read the full written version of the
paper that was handed out.

Spivak: The Politics of Translation

(1992)
The task of the translator is to surrender

herself to the linguistic rhetoricity of

theoriginal text.
RAT: reader-as-translator
Spivak outlines a poststructuralist conception
of language use where rhetoric
continually subverts meanings constructed by
logic and grammar

 Spivak argues that translators of the Third World

literatures need this linguistic model because

without a sense of rhetoricity of language a
species of neocolonialist construction of the nonwestern scene is afoot.
She criticises western translation strategies that
render Third World literatures into a sort of with-it
translatese, immediate accesible, enacting a
realistic representation of those literatures, but
devoid of the linguistic, cultural and geopolitical
differences that mark them.

Appiah: Thick Translation (1993)

He gives literary translation a political role
A literary translation doesnt communicate the

foreign authors intentions, but tries to create

a relationship to the linguistic and literary
conventions of the translating culture that
matches the relationship between the foreign
text and its own culture.

A proverb in Twi-language (Ghana)

translated into English
Kaka ne ka ne ayafunka fanyinam ka
Touthache and indebtedness and stomach

ache, debt is preferable

(The most obvious thought suggested by this
proverb is that if one has to choose among
evils one should choose the least of them.
The proverb is typical of a whole class of
proverbs that depend on playing with the
similar-sounding names of dissimilar objects)

Hatim and Mason: politeness in screen

translating (1990)
Difficulties for the subtitling translator:

1. The shift in mode from speech to writing

2. Factors that govern the medium or channel
3. The reduction of the source text
4. The requirement of matching the visual
image

Politeness Theory
They analyze translated dialogue with politeness

theory:
a formalization of speech acts by which a
speaker maintains or threatens an addressees
face, where face is defined as the want to be
inimpeded and the want to be approved of in
certain respects.
They explore the impact of translation patterns on
an audiences perception of characterization in
film.

Harvey: Translating Camp Talk (1998)

He analyzes Camp talk and its homosexual

coding in French and English-language texts

A French translator, for instance, omitted the
camp in an American novel
An American translator, in contrast, not only
reproduced the camp assigned to a character in
a French novel, but also recast a seduction
scene in homosexual terms.

 Translation is not just about texts: nor is it only

about cultures and power. It is about the relation

of the one to the other.
In this respect, translation is not unlike critical
linguistics, the branch of contemporary language
study that has grown out of the fusion of
functional-systemic linguistics and critical theory:
relation of textual analysis to the interactional,
social and political contexts that produce
language forms.

Venuti: Translation, Community,

Utopia (2000)
He theorizes translation according to

poststructuralist concepts of language,

discourse and subjectivity so as to articulate
their relations to cultural difference,
ideological contradiction, and social change.

 The point of departure is the current situation

of English-language translating:
-marginality and exploitation
-prevalence of fluent strategies that make for
easy readability and produce the illusion of
transparency, enabling a translated text to
pass for the original and thereby rendering
the translator invisible.

 Fluency masks a domestication of the

foreign text that is appropriative and

potentially imperialistic, putting the foreign to
domestic uses which, in British and American
cultures, extend the global hegemony of
English