venuti

Invisibility 19foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.Translation can be considered the communication of a foreign text,but it is always a communication limited by its address to a specificreading audience.The violent effects of translation are felt at home as well asabroad. On the one hand, translation wields enormous power in theconstruction of national identities for foreign cultures, and hence itpotentially figures in ethnic discrimination, geopoliticalconfrontations, colonialism, terrorism, war. On the other hand,translation enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision ofliterary canons in the target-language culture, inscribing poetry andfiction, for example, with the various poetic and narrative discoursesthat compete for cultural dominance in the target language.Translation also enlists the foreign text in the maintenance orrevision of dominant conceptual paradigms, researchmethodologies, and clinical practices in target-language disciplinesand professions, whether physics or architecture, philosophy orpsychiatry, sociology or law. It is these social affiliations andeffects—written into the materiality of the translated text, into itsdiscursive strategy and its range of allusiveness for the targetlanguagereader, but also into the very choice to translate it and theways it is published, reviewed, and taught—all these conditionspermit translation to be called a cultural political practice,constructing or critiquing ideology-stamped identities for foreigncultures, affirming or transgressing discursive values andinstitutional limits in the target-language culture. The violencewreaked by translation is partly inevitable, inherent in thetranslation process, partly potential, emerging at any point in theproduction and reception of the translated text, varying with specificcultural and social formations at different historical moments.The most urgent question facing the translator who possesses thisknowledge is, What to do? Why and how do I translate? Although Ihave construed translation as the site of many determinations andeffects—linguistic, cultural, economic, ideological—I also want toindicate that the freelance literary translator always exercises a choiceconcerning the degree and direction of the violence at work in anytranslating. This choice has been given various formulations, past andpresent, but perhaps none so decisive as that offered by the Germantheologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In an 1813lecture on the different methods of translation, Schleiermacher arguedthat “there are only two. Either the translator leaves the author in