venuti

Invisibility 25transparent communication, the use value of the translation in thetarget-language culture. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, locatesdiscontinuities at the level of diction, syntax, or discourse that revealthe translation to be a violent rewriting of the foreign text, a strategicintervention into the target-language culture, at once dependent onand abusive of domestic values.This method of symptomatic reading can be illustrated with thetranslations of Freud’s texts for the Standard Edition, although thetranslations acquired such unimpeachable authority that weneeded Bruno Bettelheim’s critique to become aware of thediscontinuities. Bettelheim’s point is that the translations makeFreud’s texts “appear to readers of English as abstract,depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite, and mechanized—inshort, ‘scientific’—statements about the strange and very complexworkings of our mind” (Bettelheim 1988:5). Bettelheim seems toassume that a close examination of Freud’s German is necessary todetect the translators’ scientistic strategy, but the fact is that hispoint can be demonstrated with no more than a careful reading ofthe English text. Bettelheim argues, for example, that in ThePsychopathology of Everyday Life (1960), the term “parapraxis”reveals the scientism of the translation because it is used to rendera rather simple German word, Fehlleistungen, which Bettelheimhimself prefers to translate as “faulty achievement” (Bettelheim1983:87). Yet the translator’s strategy may also be glimpsed throughcertain peculiarities in the diction of the translated text:I now return to the forgetting of names. So far we have notexhaustively considered either the case-material or the motivesbehind it As this is exactly the kind of parapraxis that I can fromtime to time observe abundantly in myself, I am at no loss forexamples. The mild attacks of migraine from which I still sufferusually announce themselves hours in advance by my forgettingnames, and at the height of these attacks, during which I am notforced to abandon my work, it frequently happens that all propernames go out of my head.(Freud 1960:21)The diction of much of this passage is so simple and common(“forgetting”), even colloquial (“go out of my head”), that“parapraxis” represents a conspicuous difference, an inconsistencyin word choice which exposes the translation process. The