venuti

24 The Translator’s Invisibilitysource language. Abusive fidelity directs the translator’s attentionaway from the conceptual signified to the play of signifiers onwhich it depends, to phonological, syntactical, and discursivestructures, resulting in a “translation that values experimentation,tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies orplurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing itsown” (Lewis 1985:41). Such a translation strategy can best be calledresistancy, not merely because it avoids fluency, but because itchallenges the target-language culture even as it enacts its ownethnocentric violence on the foreign text.The notion of foreignization can alter the ways translations areread as well as produced because it assumes a concept of humansubjectivity that is very different from the humanist assumptionsunderlying domestication. Neither the foreign writer nor thetranslator is conceived as the transcendental origin of the text, freelyexpressing an idea about human nature or communicating it intransparent language to a reader from a different culture. Rather,subjectivity is constituted by cultural and social determinations thatare diverse and even conflicting, that mediate any language use,and, that vary with every cultural formation and every historicalmoment. Human action is intentional, but determinate, selfreflexivelymeasured against social rules and resources, theheterogeneity of which allows for the possibility of change withevery self-reflexive action (Giddens 1979:chap. 2). Textualproduction may be initiated and guided by the producer, but it putsto work various linguistic and cultural materials which make thetext discontinuous, despite any appearance of unity, and whichcreate an unconscious, a set of unacknowledged conditions that areboth personal and social, psychological and ideological. Thus, thetranslator consults many different target-language culturalmaterials, ranging from dictionaries and grammars to texts,discursive strategies, and translations, to values, paradigms, andideologies, both canonical and marginal. Although intended toreproduce the source-language text, the translator’s consultation ofthese materials inevitably reduces and supplements it, even whensource-language cultural materials are also consulted. Their sheerheterogeneity leads to discontinuities—between the source-languagetext and the translation and within the translation itself—that aresymptomatic of its ethnocentric violence. A humanist method ofreading translations elides these discontinuities by locating asemantic unity adequate to the foreign text, stressing intelligibility,