Chapter 9

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Introductory video

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Multiple Choice

Further Reading

Foreignization and domestication

Robinson, D. (2011) Translation and the Problem of Sway, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Antoine Berman

Berman, A. (2009) Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne, translated and edited by F. Massardier-Kenney, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Massardier-Kenney, F. (2010) ‘Antoine Berman’s way-making to translation as a creative and critical act’, Translation Studies 3.3: 259–71.

For publishers and translation reviews

Bush, P. (2004) ‘Reviewing translations: Barcelona, London and Paris’, EnterText 4.3 Supplement.

Hale, T. (1998) ‘Publishing strategies’, in M. Baker and K. Malmkjær (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 1st edition, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 190–4.

Munday, J. (1998) ‘The Caribbean conquers the world? An analysis of the reception of García Márquez in translation’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 75.1: 137–44.

Some interviews with translators

Center for Translation Studies, University of Texas at Dallas, www.translation.utdallas.edu/resources/interviews

Gregory Rabassa, Edith Grossman and Michael F. Moore in conversation, Pen Audio Archive.

For sociology (Bourdieu, Latour, Luhmann…)

Chesterman, A. (2006) ‘Questions in the sociology of translation’, in J. Ferreira Duarte, A. Assis Rosa and T. Seruya (eds) Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 9–27.

Hermans, T. (2007) The Conference of the Tongues, Manchester: St Jerome, for Luhmann.

Inghilleri, M. (ed.) (2005) Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting, Special issue of The Translator 11.2.

Sapiro, G. (2014) ‘The Sociology of Translation: A New Research Domain’, in S. Bermann and C. Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies, Chichester: Wiley, pp. 82–95.

Blakesley, J. (2018) ‘Introduction’, in J. Blakesley (ed), Sociologies of Poetry Translation: Emerging Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1-20.

Research projects

  1. Examine how ‘visible’ translation is in your own culture, looking at translation flows and rates. Do your findings tally with Venuti’s analysis of English?
  2. How far do you agree with Venuti’s statement (1992: 10, see chapter) that ‘any attempt to make translation visible today is necessarily a political gesture’? What kinds of ethical decisions does a translator have to make?
  3. What do you think of the hypothesis of Pym (2004: 200, fn7, see chapter) that ‘the sheer size of English could mean that much of the variety and new blood that other language groups seek through translation, English language cultures may be receiving through distribution without translation’.
  4. Look at Rabassa’s and Levine’s works and at Venuti’s descriptions of his own translations. How far do you agree with Toury that such accounts by translators are ‘unreliable’? Search for other accounts by translators of your own language pairs.
  5. Find reviews of other work(s) or author(s) in your TL. How do the reviewers’ comments compare to the comments analysed in the case study? Look at a range of paratexts (peritexts and epitexts) of one translated book, or an author. What is the function of these different paratexts in your examples?
  6. Maier (1990, see chapter) calls for the incorporation of translation theory into reviews of translation. Put together your own model for translation reviews, incorporating elements of theory (from this and previous chapters). Try writing a critique of a TT with your model. How successful is it?
  7. Many translation theorists speak of the need for more ‘raw material’ (Maier 2007: 2, see chapter) about translators, their history and their working practices. What kinds of ‘raw material’ are available? How might you go about researching it? What type of material seems to be lacking?
  8. Examine translation research that draws on Bourdieu, Latour and Luhmann (see Further Reading). Note the different terminology and features of each model. What is the main focus of each? In your opinion, which is the most appropriate for the questions you wish to investigate? If possible, speak to sociologists in your institution about these and other theorists whose ideas may be applicable to the study of the translator.
  9. Simeoni (1998: 31, see chapter) laments that ‘modern sociographies of single translators’ professional trajectories are sorely lacking’. He suggests using simple interviews and biographical research to fill this gap. Make such a study of a translator in your own culture and attempt to describe the habitus of the individual. Is it one of ‘subservience’? What factors seem to have been central to the formation of this habitus?

Venuti

Discussion of Venuti’s work

Venuti’s analysis of the British and American publishing hegemony might seem to tie in with the power relations of the postcolonial world (see Chapter 8), but it has sparked wide debate and a backlash from some translation theorists – see, for example, the criticisms in Hermans (1999: 1–3) and Liu Yameng’s (2007) call for ‘representational justice’ for Southern source texts rather than a foreignization in translation. Pym (1996) takes issue with Venuti’s figures, noting that, although the percentages of translations published in the UK and the USA might seem low, they do in fact represent large numbers of books and that the numbers have increased as the number of published books has increased.

Despite Pym’s sarcastic stance towards Venuti, he raises a number of pertinent issues, including the following:

  1. Will translation really change if translators refuse to translate fluently (Pym 1996: 166)? Pym (ibid.: 174) notes that Venuti’s ‘call for action’, for translators to demand increased visibility, is best exemplified by Venuti himself as a translator–theorist. Although Pym questions whether other translators survive by adopting this stance, there are cases, such as Pevear and Volokhonsky’s new English translations of Dostoevksy, where a non-fluent strategy has been acclaimed (Venuti 2008: 122–4).
  2. Although Venuti concentrates on translation into English, the trend towards a translation policy of ‘fluency’ (or ‘domestication’) occurs in translations into other languages as well. Pym (1996: 170) cites Brazil, Spain and France as examples. This would seem to suggest that translation might be, at the current time, typically domesticating, irrespective of the relative power of source and target cultures.
  3. Pym (2004: 200, fn. 7) sees the English-language book market as being much bigger than other languages which gives it access to a greater variety of own-language publications, including various varieties of English (Australian, Indian, South African . . .). He hypothesizes that ‘the sheer size of English could mean that much of the variety and new blood that other language groups seek through translation, English language cultures may be receiving through distribution without translation’.
  4. Pym also asks if Venuti’s ‘resistancy’ is testable. He relates it to Toury’s law of tolerance of interference (see Chapter 7), with fluency (‘non-tolerance of interference’) expected to occur generally in translation. Thus, suggests Pym (1996: 171), it is not surprising that this phenomenon should occur in British and American translation. Nevertheless, Pym concedes (ibid.: 176) that Venuti ‘does enable us to talk about translators as real people in political situations, about the quantitative aspects of translation policies, and about ethical criteria that might relate  translators to the societies of the future’. However, Venuti does not offer a specific methodology to apply to the analysis of translation. His numerous case studies of translation encompass a range of research methods, including  discussion of translators’ prefaces and analysis of extracts of ST–TT pairs  in order to assess the translation strategy prevalent in a given context and culture. Nonetheless, Venuti’s general premises about foreignizing and domesticating translation practices, and about the invisibility of the translator and the relative power of the publisher and the translator, can be investigated in a variety of  ways by:
  • comparing ST and TT linguistically for signs of foreignizing and domesticating practices;
  • interviewing the translators about their strategies and/or researching what the translators say they are doing, their correspondence with the authors and the different drafts of a translation if available;
  • interviewing the publishers, editors and agents to see what their aims are in publishing translations, how they choose which books to translate and what instructions they give to translators;
  • looking at how many books are translated and sold, which ones are chosen and into which languages, and how trends vary over time;
  • looking at the kind of translation contracts that are made and how ‘visible’ the translator is in the final product;
  • seeing how literally ‘visible’ the fact of translation is, looking at the packaging of the text, the appearance or otherwise of the translator’s name on the title page, the copyright assignation, translators’ prefaces, correspondence, etc.;
  • analysing the reviews of a translation, author or period. The aim would be to see what mentions are made of the translators (are they ‘visible’?) and by what criteria reviewers (and the literary ‘élite’) judge translations at a given time and in a given culture.

References

  • Hermans, T. (1999) Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained, Manchester: St Jerome.
  • Liu Yameng (2007) ‘Towards “representational justice” in translation practice’, in J. Munday (ed.) (2007), Translation as Intervention, pp. 54–70.
  • Pym, A. (1996) ‘Venuti’s visibility’ (Review of The Translator’s Invisibility), Target  8.1: 165–77.
    • —— (2004) The Moving Text: Localization, Translation, and Distribution, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Venuti, L. (1995/2008) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London and New York: Routledge.

Exploration

9.2 See related chapter 9 Venuti tab on this website

9.3 Booth, M. (2008) ‘Translator v. Author (2007): Girls of Riyadh go to New York’, Translation Studies 1.2: 197–211.

9.5 Buzelin, H. (2013), ‘Sociology and Translation Studies’, in C. Millan and F. Bartrina (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, 186–201, Abingdon: Routledge.

9.7 Bielsa, E. (2013) ‘Translation and the international circulation of literature: A comparative analysis of the reception of Roberto Bolaño’s work in Spanish and English’, The Translator 19.2: 157–81.

See also the Free Reading Materials tab.