| Thursday, July 15, 2010

Venuti’s ‘The Translator’s Invisibility’, I’m discovering, is not a light read. It’s not an easy-going business novel which along the way teaches you an idea or two which it might be useful to be aware of. It is, though, packed with serious translation ideas and very thought provoking if you like wondering about translation, culture and human communication.

Last week I mentioned that a first reading of the first section of his book had made me wonder again if 100% translation perfection was even possible and I introduced you to Venuti’s ideas about the foreignisation or domestication of a translated text.

This week, we must look more closely at Venuti’s opening gambit proper: the idea of fluency in translation, which he offers up as the dominant translation philosophy into English for at least the past several centuries. Reading the first few pages, it doesn’t appear to be a philosophy he quite agrees with.

The idea of a ‘fluent translation’ is often mentioned in the same breath as phrases like ‘illusion of transparency’ or even “the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion; the translated text seems ‘natural’, that is, not translated.”

According to Venuti, a translated text is judged acceptable by: ‘most publishers, readers and reviewers’ when it demonstrates such fluency, seems transparent and appears, in fact, not to be a translation at all but the original, as well as being easy to read, written in modern, widely understood prose and endowed with ‘precise meaning’.

Clearly, then, a fluent translation—and a critically well-received one—is thought to be domesticated—the foreign text and ideas are expressed in terms and concepts which are already easily understood by the reader in their own language and culture.

Venuti also provides some ideas on what reviewers and readers should be thinking about when assessing the value of a translation, namely its:

• Accuarcy;
• Intended audience;
• Economic value in the current book market;
• Relation to literary trends in English;
• Place in the translator’s career.

He then goes on to describe the relationship between ideas of fluent translation and transparency and the economic development of society, citing the economic and political power of scientific research and the rise of marketing and advertising communications following World War II as key elements in the push towards the standardisation of language use in English.

He even cites US poet Charles Bernstein:

“…this is not simply a matter of stylistic choice but of social governance: we are not free to choose the language of the workplace or the family we are born into, though we are free, within limits, to rebel against it.”

I get the feeling that, as the book progresses, a lot is going to be said about the mixture of (political) philosophies with the act of translation and how that affects everything from the choice of the work to be translated to the words which are chosen and even the selection of meanings which the translator ‘chooses’ to translate.

Which brings us nicely to Venuti’s idea of ‘transindividual determinants’: how far is your writing, translation or creative output truly original authorship and how far is it determined by the prior influence of social, cultural and linguistic experiences of which you are most likely unaware at the moment of creation?