UTF-8__0415396417Translation

TRANSLATION, ETHICS, POLITICSIf the effect of fluency is to marginalize translated works and to make theminvisible among the mass of other works, it also makes the translator invisible,in a double sense. As a translating strategy, fluency requires the translatorto withdraw into discreet anonymity. But this very discretion, Venuti argues,locks translators collectively, as a professional group, into an economicallydisadvantageous position. Literary translators in particular – the main groupVenuti is talking about – may be underpaid and routinely overlooked in bookreviews or on the title pages of translated books, but they only have themselvesto blame for their lack of clout and bargaining power. Their willingness toremain invisible in their texts renders them socially invisible as well.To counter the detrimental ideological effects of fluency, Venuti proposes,and practises in his own translations from the Italian, a form of resistant or‘minoritizing’ translation, initially also called ‘foreignizing’ (‘defamiliarizing’might be a better term). The inspiration is drawn from Schleiermacher, Lewisand Berman, but Venuti has more strings to his bow than the dogged literalismthat Berman was after. He is prepared to exploit all the registers ofEnglish, including anachronisms and slang, to inscribe difference in the translationitself, leave on the text a translator’s imprint, and tap what he calls the‘remainder’, a term borrowed from Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1990) to mean allthose linguistic features that cannot readily find a place in the neatly orderedgrammars of standard usage, the homogenized standard language throughwhich dominant social classes exercise control. How the reader is to distinguishbetween the translator’s invention and usage that reflects peculiaritiesof the original remains an open question. The ultimate aim of Venuti’s translationsis to challenge linguistic and ideological hegemonies and to contributeto a change in mentality. He realizes, though, that literature has only a limitedreach and that defamiliarization needs to be practised with caution if thereader is to continue reading. His academic work has unearthed a historicalgenealogy of ‘resistant’ translation that informs his own endeavours as atranslator but that has also illustrated the diversity of historical conceptionsof translation in the Anglophone tradition.Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist theorizing, GayatriSpivak (1993/2004, 2005) makes a case that chimes with Venuti’s and especiallyBerman’s, except that her reflections stem from her experience translating awoman novelist writing in Bengali. Spivak wants the translator to go beyondtransferring content and to surrender instead to the original, entering itstextual protocols and retaining the intimacy of that encounter in a literalEnglish version. For all the theoretical sophistication of her discourse, Spivakends up evoking the traditional association of translation with inadequacyand loss; she admits that she never teaches texts she cannot read in theoriginal.Kwame Anthony Appiah (1993/2004) suggests that translations fromtraditions remote from the Western sphere of knowledge should beextensively annotated, a strategy he designates as ‘thick translation’, after99