últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

OVIDI CARBONELL–IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION
This is basically untrue. I would agree with Venuti in that traditional, scientistic
linguistic approaches did impede translation research and training, but these approaches
have long been superseded, and Venuti’s statement (see also Venuti n.d.) seems to imply
either that translation has not yet incorporated such new, sociolinguistic, discoursive, pragmatic, semiotic,
critical discourse analysis views, or that he is simply unaware of these developments. But then in
his recent contribution at the University of Vic Venuti once again expresses his fear that
beginner translators might be exposed to a perspective that is just linguistic or textual:
analytical tools are usually derived from varieties of linguistics, notably text
linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. And the application of these areas of
linguistics will always produce a mass of analytical detail that is at once much more and
much less than a translator needs to solve a translation problem. Much more detail than
necessary: because linguistics has created such formidable analytical concepts, it always
threatens to turn translation studies into a field of applied linguistics, textual analysis for the
sake of linguistics research instead of translating. Much less detail than necessary: because
translation decisions are also made on the basis of textual effects, cultural values, and social
functions, not simply equivalence, a linguistic-informed analysis will stop short of the
cultural and social factors that shape decisions, and that therefore can powerfully explain
them. Sociolinguistics will go some way toward recovering these factors, but in the absence
of cultural and social theories it will not go very far. (1999: 166)
I find this assertion to be particularly disturbing. What does Venuti understand by
applied linguistics? What does he understand by text or textual? What does Venuti
understand by linguistic-oriented approach? What does he understand by a scientific model? What
these assertions do hide is an unfortunate parochialist conception and an untenable shortsighted
conception of discourse and textual linguistics that is most perjudicial to the
development of translation as a multidisciplinary approach.
I see no point in arguing that translation is an independent discipline insisting in its
differences with linguistics −or in trying to delimit it against the grain, no more than in
trying to subsume translation within linguistics or culture or any other field. These seem to
me byzantine arguments that won’t get us anywhere and I would see no point in quoting
them here but for the dangerous reductionism they seem to imply.
Cultural transfer seems to be a thornier issue, as it involves a wider ethnolinguistic
approach. But as regards identity formation, I should be able to point out a few remarks.
First, we should distinguish between several instances of sociolinguistic identity formation:
cultural / linguistic identity; group/ personal identity; social/ institutional/ political
identity. Apparently, translation does not necessarily entail a positioning (on the part of the
reader or the translator) as regards identity (such is the approach of traditional [linguistic or
anthropological] theories). But in fact it does: 1) in the selection of texts translated; 2) in the
interaction that is achieved through the use of [translated] texts; 3) in the role texts (and
their features) play in the reader’s world (integration).
1. Selection (sociological aspect)
NOT EVERYTHING IS TRANSLATED: Translations are selections. Translation
teaching usually emphasises that only real translations should be used for teaching purposes, but the
difficulties in finding appropriate texts to show certain characteristics or qualities
sometimes determine that students may have the otherwise general impression that all texts
can be translated. A sufficient theorisation of the commisioned work is yet to be done
−needless to say that genre analysis is very useful for specialised texts, but seems to be
112