UTF-8__0415396417Translation

KEY CONCEPTSFURTHER READING: Hatim (2001); Hatim and Munday (2004); Nord(1991/2005, 1991, 1997, 2003).(FIT) FÉDÉRATION INTERNATIONALE DES TRADUCTEURS /INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF TRANSLATORSFIT was founded in 1953 on the initiative of the Société française des traducteursand its President Pierre-François Caillé under the auspices of UNESCO(the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization); it is aworldwide gathering of professional translator associations (now numberingover one hundred). With UNESCO, FIT produced two landmark documentson the status of literary translators. The first, the Translator’s Charter, waspassed at the FIT Congress in Dubrovnik in 1963 and amended in Oslo in1994; amongst other things, it set out the obligations, rights and economicand social position of the translator. The second document was the seminalNairobi Declaration, adopted in 1976.In the words of the FIT website, ‘FIT is … concerned with the conditionsof professional practice in various countries and strives to defend translators’rights in particular and freedom of expression in general’, although formany translators some of the goals in its Charter and Declaration remain anaspiration rather than a reality. (JM)FURTHER READING: http://www.fit-ift.org/FOREIGNIZATION (FOREIGNIZING TRANSLATION STRATEGY)A concept that owes its origins to the German scholar FriedrichSchleiermacher (1813/2004) and refers to the question of whether translatorsshould ‘move the reader toward the writer’ or ‘the writer toward the reader’.The twentieth-century French theorist and translator Antoine Berman disapprovedof the tendency to avoid the sense of foreignness in translation,claiming instead that ‘the properly ethical aim of the translating act is receivingthe foreign as foreign’ (Berman 1985/2004: 277). However, Berman alsorecognized that this foreignness in translated texts is unable to come throughbecause of a ‘system of textual deformation’, which he calls ‘negative analytic’(ibid.: 278). Opposite to this concept is Berman’s elaboration of a ‘positiveanalytic’ of ‘literal translation’ (ibid.: 288–9), through which translators canbring the sense of the ‘foreign’ into the TT.‘Foreignization’ is the term used by Venuti (1995/2008) and is opposed todomestication. Foreignization, which may involve lexical and syntactic borrowingsand calques, reflects the SL norms and reminds the target culturereaders that they are dealing with a translation, thus in some ways bringingthem closer to the experience of the foreign text. These strategies retain asense of foreignness of the original and have the advantage of resisting the189