venuti

Call to action 311attention to the secondary status of the translation and signal thelinguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text.Contemporary translators need to develop a more sophisticatedliterary practice, wherein the “literary” encompasses the varioustraditions of British and American literature and the variousdialects of English. Translators committed to changing theircultural marginality can do so only within the codes that arespecific to the target-language culture. This means limitingdiscursive experiments to perceptible deviations that may risk butstop short of the parodic or the incomprehensible, that release thedérive of cultural discourses in the target language.Translators must also force a revision of the codes—cultural,economic, legal—that marginalize and exploit them. They canwork to revise the individualistic concept of authorship that hasbanished translation to the fringes of Anglo-American culture,not only by developing innovative translation practices in whichtheir work becomes visible to readers, but also by presentingsophisticated rationales for these practices in prefaces, essays,lectures, interviews. Such self-presentations will indicate that thelanguage of the translation originates with the translator in adecisive way, but also that the translator is not its sole origin: atranslator’s originality lies in choosing a particular foreign textand a particular combination of dialects and discourses from thehistory of British and American literature in response to anexisting cultural situation. Recognizing the translator as anauthor questions the individualism of current concepts ofauthorship by suggesting that no writing can be mere selfexpressionbecause it is derived from a cultural tradition at aspecific historical moment.This questioning must also be conducted in the language ofcontracts with publishers. Translators will do well to insist on theirauthorial relation to the translated text during negotiations. Theyshould demand contracts that define the translation as an “originalwork of authorship” instead of a “work-for-hire,” that copyright thetranslation in the translator’s name, and that offer standard financialterms for authors, namely an advance against royalties and a share ofsubsidiary rights sales. In the long run, it will be necessary to effect amore fundamental change, a revision of current copyright law thatrestricts the foreign author’s control over the translation so as toacknowledge its relative autonomy from the foreign text. The foreignauthor’s translation rights should be limited to a short period, after