The Scandals of Translation: Towards
an Ethics of Difference. By Lawrence Venuti (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998) £15.99 paper.
The same but different.... The phrase is not only a reasonable
description of translation (repressive tradition emphasizes
sameness; Venuti values difference) but also of what international
publishers demand of sequels: this book extends only slightly
the arguments already developed in Venuti’s The Translator’s
Invisibility (1995).
Those arguments might be summarized as follows: Translation
has been marginalized in literary studies because it is
supposed not to exist as a legitimate mode of textual transformation;
this marginalizing is institutionalized in copyright law,
which does little but obscure the activity of translators
and encourage the current imbalance in translation flows
(huge numbers of texts are translated from English; relatively
few are rendered into English); the repressive linguistic
study of translation adds insult to injury by mechanizing
equivalence, thus suppressing the active role that translations
play in the constitution of cultures; and worse--and this
is the relatively new bit--linguistic approaches only look
at relations between standard languages, encouraging translators
to conform to those standards rather than help develop minor
cultural identities. Venuti also proposes ‘remedies’ to
this apparently scandalous situation: translations should
be studied in literature courses as translations, dealing
with the historical choices made by translators; cultural
studies may then logically replace linguistics as the discipline
most appropriate to the study of translation; this more
liberating approach should not only value the way translations
can help minoritize hegemonic cultures but should also encourage
translators to use minority discourses; and remedied copyright
law should allow texts to be free of translation rights
from five years after first publication (thus encouraging
more translations into English). In short, it’s all good
revolutionary stuff, explicitly designed to upset readers
who thought translations themselves should be the cause
of scandal because they change originals. The result is
a book that effectively prolongs the debates begun in Venuti’s
earlier efforts; it can be expected to help set the agenda
in non-linguistic translation studies. If only it were as
coherent as it is well-intentioned.
Here’s a shortlist of shortcomings, to add to the few I’ve
mentioned elsewhere (1996):
Venuti’s arguments rely on fundamentally binary oppositions
that allow him to talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ translations
in terms of hegemonic vs. minority culture, standard vs.
non-standard language, critical studies vs. linguistics,
and so on. This means his most powerful arguments do not
really concern translation but are simply ideas about what
cultures should be and how language should be used. In fact,
the one pair that did concern translation in pre-scandal
Venuti--the Schleiermacherian distinction between ‘foreignizing’
and ‘domesticating’ translation--doesn’t seem to apply anymore,
since domestication into a minority language is now okay.
So we have somehow floated above translation studies and
entered opinions about the world’s cultures.
Within this strange world, Venuti assumes that translation
‘threatens’ just about everything and everyone, including
traditional linguistics, Gricean cooperation, religious
institutions, philosophy, and all knowledge of other cultures.
This may be so. But in arguing the point Venuti demonstrates
a pretty poor grasp of what has been going on in linguistics
for the past twenty years (and thus the limits to his understanding
of cooperation) and he comes close to the trap of automatic
self-justification: because translation is a threat, it
was not talked about; although one could just as easily
argue that translation has been ignored precisely because
it has been efficient enough or perhaps too benign to pose
any threats. Further, Venuti’s anecdotal observation is
considered so general in application that, were it true,
there would surely be no need to change the way translators
translate. And yet that’s what Venuti wants: somehow the
‘always threatening’ has to be made the ‘now more threatening
than ever’. How might this come about? Well, when a reviewer
did not like a translation by Venuti, it was the fault of
the reader, not the translator: “she refused to understand
it according to the explanation presented in my introduction”
(19). That sounds like a threat: read me the way I tell
you, or I’ll name you in my book. If only all translators
had that option.
As for Venuti’s proposed copyright solution, it is hard
to see how a moratorium on translation rights would really
benefit the needy: since the profit motive is considered
absolute (162), Western publishers would simply wait five
years so as to avoid paying non-Western authors anything.
And then, consider the fact that this prolonged argument
in favor of minoritizing cultures and non-standard languages
is all presented in perfectly standard academic English,
by a major international publisher that is not particularly
interested in carrying translations. This sequel did not
set out to practice what it preaches. In giving more of
the same, it creates rather less difference than one might
have hoped for.
REFERENCES
Pym, Anthony. “Venuti’s Visibility”. Target 8/2 (1996):
165-177.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History
of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
.
- Last update
20 February 1999
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