Translation Changes Everything

Theory and Practice

Lawrence Venuti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135107956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

In Translation Changes Everything leading theorist Lawrence Venuti gathers fourteen of his incisive essays since 2000.

The selection sketches the trajectory of his thinking about translation while engaging with the main trends in research and commentary. The issues covered include basic concepts like equivalence, retranslation, and reader reception; sociological topics like the impact of translations in the academy and the global cultural economy; and philosophical problems such as the translator's unconscious and translation ethics.

Every essay presents case studies that include Venuti's own translation projects, illuminating the connections between theoretical concepts and verbal choices. The texts, drawn from a broad variety of languages, are both humanistic and pragmatic, encompassing such forms as poems and novels, religious and philosophical works, travel guidebooks and advertisements. The discussions all explore practical applications, whether writing, publishing, reviewing, teaching or studying translations.

Venuti's aim is to conceive of translation as an interpretive act with far-reaching social effects, at once enabled and constrained by specific cultural situations.

This latest chapter in his developing work is essential reading for translators and students of translation alike.

1

TRANSLATION, COMMUNITY, UTOPIA

An antinomy in theory

Even though no one seems likely to deny that communication is the primary aim and function of a translated text, today we are far from thinking that translating is a simple communicative act. In contemporary translation theory informed by Continental philosophical traditions such as existential phenomenology and poststructuralism, language is constitutive of thought, and meaning a site of multiple determinations, so that translating is readily seen as investing the source text with a significance that is specific to the translating language and culture (see, for example, Heidegger 1975; Lewis 1985; Benjamin 1989). A translation never communicates in an untroubled fashion because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences of the source text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences drawn from the receiving situation to enable the translation to circulate there. The source text, then, is not so much communicated as domesticated or, more precisely, assimilated to receiving intelligibilities and interests through an inscription. This inscription begins with the very choice of a text for translation, always a very selective, densely motivated choice, and continues in the development of discursive strategies to translate it, always a choice of certain receiving discourses over others. Hence the inscription is totalizing, even if never total, never seamless or final. It can be said to operate in every word of the translated text long before that text is further processed by readers, made to bear other meanings and to serve other interests in the receiving situation.

Seen as domesticating inscription, never quite cross-cultural communication, translation has moved theorists towards an ethical reflection wherein remedies are formulated to signal the foreignness of the source text, what makes it linguistically and culturally different in relation to the receiving situation (see, for example, Berman 1999 and Venuti 1998). Yet an ethics that counters the domesticating effects of the inscription can only be formulated and practiced primarily in domestic terms, in the dialects, registers, discourses, and styles of the translating language and culture. And this means that the linguistic and cultural differences of the source text can only be signaled indirectly, by their displacement in the translation, through differences introduced into values and institutions in the receiving situation. This ethical attitude is therefore simultaneous with a political agenda: the domestic terms of the inscription become the focus of rewriting in the translation, the development of discursive strategies through which the hierarchies that rank receiving values are disarranged to set going processes of defamiliarization, canon reformation, ideological critique, and institutional change. A translator may find that the very concept of the domestic merits interrogation for its concealment of heterogeneity and hybridity, which can complicate existing stereotypes, canons, and standards applied in translation.

When motivated by this ethical politics of difference, the translator seeks to build a community with foreign cultures, to share an understanding with and of them and to collaborate on projects founded on that understanding, going so far as to allow it to revise and develop receiving values and institutions. The very impulse to seek a community abroad suggests that the translator wishes to extend or complete a particular receiving situation, to compensate for a defect in the translating language and culture. As Maurice Blanchot argues, the very notion of community arises when an insufficiency puts individual agency into question (Blanchot 1988: 56). The ethically and politically motivated translator cannot fail to see the lack of an equal footing in the translation process, stimulated by an interest in the foreign, but inescapably leaning towards the receptor. Such a translator knows that a translation can never simply communicate a foreign text because it makes possible only a domesticated understanding of that text, however much defamiliarized, however much subversive or supportive of the domestic.

In the absence of cross-cultural communication unaffected by receiving intelligibilities and interests, what kinds of communities can translation possibly foster? What communities can be based on the domestic inscription of the foreign that limits and redirects the communicative aim of translation?

Communication in translation

In the 1970s, the formalist theorist Gideon Toury tried to define translation as a communicative act while acknowledging the receiving values that come into play, the target norms that constrain communication. Translation, he wrote,

is communication in translated messages within a certain cultural-linguistic system, with all relevant consequences for the decomposition of the source message, the establishment of the invariant, its transfer across the cultural-linguistic border and the recomposition of the target message.

(Toury 1980: 17, his emphasis)

“The establishment of the invariant”: if communication in translation is defined as the transmission of an invariant, does not the very need to establish the invariant mean that translating does something more and perhaps other than communicate? The source message is always interpreted and reinvented, especially in cultural forms open to interpretation, such as literary texts, philosophical treatises, film subtitling, advertising copy, conference papers, legal testimony. How can the source message ever be invariant if it undergoes a process of “establishment” in a “certain” target language and culture? It is always reconstructed according to different sets of values and always variable according to different languages and cultures. Toury ultimately reckoned with the problem of communication by sidestepping it altogether: he shifted the emphasis away from exploring a relation of equivalence between the translation and the source text and instead focused on the acceptability of the translation in the target culture. Thinking about the foreign is thus preempted in favor of research that describes receiving cultural norms.

But let us pursue this preempted line of enquiry. What formal and thematic features of a novel, for instance, can be described as invariant in the translation process? Since canons of accuracy vary according to culture and historical moment, definitions of what constitutes the invariant will likewise vary. Let us ask the question of current translation practices. Today, translators of novels into most languages seek to maintain unchanged the basic elements of narrative form. The plot isn’t rewritten to alter events or their sequence. And none of the characters’ actions is deleted or revised. Dates, historical and geographical markers, the characters’ names – even when the names are rather complicated and foreign-sounding – these are generally not altered or only in rare cases (e.g. Russian names). Contemporary canons of accuracy are based on an adequacy to the source text: an accurate translation of a novel must not only reproduce the basic elements of narrative form, but should also do so in roughly the same number of pages.

In 1760, however, Abbé Prévost claimed that accuracy governed his French version of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela even though he reduced the seven English volumes to four in French. “I have not changed anything pertaining to the author’s intention,” the Abbé asserted, “nor have I changed much in the manner in which he put that intention into words” (Lefevere 1992: 39). To us, such statements don’t merely substitute a different canon of accuracy (founded on notions of authorial intention and style); they also seem to exceed the very practice of translation. Prévost’s text involved abridgement and adaptation as well.

In current practices, a translation of a novel can and must communicate the basic elements of narrative form that structure the source text. But it is still not true that these elements are free from variation. Any language use is likely to vary the standard dialect by sampling a diversity of nonstandard or minor formations: regional or group dialects, jargons, clichés and slogans, stylistic innovations, archaisms, neologisms. Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls these variations the “remainder” because they exceed communication of a univocal meaning and instead draw attention to the conditions of the communicative act, conditions that are in the first instance linguistic and cultural, but that ultimately embrace social and political factors (Lecercle 1990). The remainder in literary texts is much more complicated, of course, usually a sedimentation of forms and themes, past as well as present (Jameson 1981: 140–41).

Any communication through translating, then, will involve the release of a domestic remainder, especially in the case of literature. The source text is rewritten in domestic dialects and discourses, registers and styles, which produce textual effects that signify only in the history of the translating language and culture. The translator may produce these effects to communicate the source text, trying to invent analogues for its forms and themes. But the result will always go beyond any communication to release target-oriented possibilities of meaning.

Consider a recent English translation of an Italian novel, Declares Pereira, Patrick Creagh’s 1995 version of Antonio Tabucchi’s Sostiene Pereira (1994). Creagh’s English consists mostly of the current standard dialect. But he cultivated a noticeable strain of colloquialism that sometimes veers into underworld argot. He rendered “taceva” (“silent”) as “gagged,” “quattro uomini dall’aria sinistra” (“four men with a sinister air”) as “four shady-looking characters,” “stare con gli occhi aperti” (“stay with your eyes open”) as “keep your eyes peeled,” “un personaggio del regime” (“a figure in the regime”) as “bigwig,” “senza pigiama” (“without pyjamas”) as “in his birthday-suit,” and “va a dormire” (“go to sleep”) as “beddy-byes” (Tabucchi 1994: 13, 19, 43, 73, 108, 196; 1995: 5, 9, 25, 45, 67, 127). Creagh also mixed in some distinctively British words and phrases. He rendered “orrendo” (“horrible”) as “bloody awful,” “una critica molto negativa” (“a very negative criticism”) as “slating,” “pensioncina” (“little boarding house”) as “little doss-house,” “sono nei guai” (“I’m in trouble”) as “I’m in a pickle,” “parlano” (“they talk”) as “natter,” and “a vedere” (“to look”) as “to take a dekko” (Tabucchi 1994: 80, 81, 84, 104, 176; 1995: 50, 51, 54, 64, 115).

Within parentheses I have inserted alternative renderings to highlight the range and inventiveness of Creagh’s translating. The alternatives should not be regarded as somehow more accurate than his choices. In each case, both renderings establish a lexicographical equivalence, a semantic correspondence to the Italian words and phrases according to dictionary definitions. Creagh’s choices communicate meanings that can be called “invariant” only insofar as they are reduced to a basic meaning shared by both the Italian and the English.

Creagh’s translation, however, varies this meaning. The variation might be called a “shift” as that concept has been developed in translation studies since the 1960s (see, for example, Catford 1965; Blum-Kulka 1986; Toury 1995). If Creagh’s English is juxtaposed to Tabucchi’s Italian, lexical shifts can indeed be detected, shifts in register from the current standard dialect of Italian to various colloquial dialects in British and American English. In response to my queries, Creagh admitted that “some phrases are more colloquial in English than in Italian,” making clear that his shifts are not required by structural differences between the two languages, but rather motivated by literary and cultural aims: “I even tried,” Creagh stated, “to use only idioms that would have been current in 1938,” the period of the novel, “and to hand them to the right speaker, to make slight linguistic differences between the characters” (correspondence: 8 December 1998).

Yet the notion of a shift does not entirely describe the textual effects set going by Creagh’s choices. His translation signifies beyond his literary and cultural intentions by releasing a peculiarly English remainder: the different dialects and registers establish a relation to English literary styles, genres, and traditions. In terms of generic distinctions, Tabucchi’s novel is a political thriller. Set under the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, it recounts how one Pereira, the aging cultural editor of a Lisbon newspaper, is slowly radicalized over a few weeks, which climax when he prints an attack on the fascist regime. Creagh’s polylingual mixture of standard and colloquial, British and American, gives his prose an extremely conversational quality that is consistent with Tabucchi’s presentation of the thriller plot: Pereira’s narrative takes an oral form, an official testimony to an unnamed authority (hence the curious title). Yet the slangy English also alters the characterization of Pereira by suggesting that he is less staid and perhaps younger than the elderly journalist presented in the Italian text.

At the same time, the British and American slang refers to moments in the history of English-language fiction – for the informed reader of that fiction. It can recall thrillers that address similar political themes, notably such novels of Graham Greene as The Confidential Agent (1939), which, like Tabucchi’s, is set during the Spanish Civil War and involves an attempt to aid the Republican side against Franco. If this literary reference is recognized, Creagh’s translation in effect invites the reader to distinguish between Tabucchi’s leftwing opposition to fascism and Greene’s more cautious liberalism (Diemert 1996: 180–81). Greene saw his thrillers as “entertainments” engaged in social and political issues, designed “not to change things but to give them expression” (Allain 1983: 81). The linguistic resemblances between Creagh’s translation and Greene’s novel highlight the ideological differences that distinguish Tabucchi’s and Greene’s treatments of the same historical event.

Thus although Creagh’s translation can be said to communicate the form and theme of Tabucchi’s novel, neither of these features escapes the variations introduced by the inscription of an English-language remainder. The remainder does not just inscribe a set of linguistic and cultural differences specific to the receiving situation; it also supplies the loss of the differences that constituted the source text. The loss occurs, as Alasdair MacIntyre observes, because in any “tradition-bearing community” the “language-in-use is closely tied to the expression of the shared beliefs of that tradition,” and this gives a “historical dimension” to languages which often fails to survive the translating process (MacIntyre 1988: 384). MacIntyre argues that this problem of untranslatability is most acute with “the internationalized languages-in-use in late twentieth-century modernity,” like English, which “have minimal presuppositions in respect of possibly rival belief systems” and so will “neutralize” the historical dimension of the source text (ibid.). In English translation, therefore,

a kind of text which cannot be read as the text it is out of context is nevertheless rendered contextless. But in so rendering it, it is turned into a text which is no longer the author’s, nor such as would be recognized by the audience to whom it was addressed.

(Ibid.: 385, his emphasis)

Creagh’s translation at once inscribed an English-language cultural history in Tabucchi’s novel and displaced the historical dimension of the Italian text. This text occupies a place in a narrative tradition that includes resistance novels during and after the Second World War, as well as novels about life under fascism, Alberto Moravia’s Il conformista (1951; The Conformist), for instance, and Giorgio Bassani’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis). The very fact that Italian history contains a fascist tradition ensured that Tabucchi’s readers would understand the Salazarist regime in distinctively Italian terms, not merely as an allusion to Mussolini’s dictatorship, but as an allegory of current events. Sostiene Pereira was written in 1993 and published the following year, when a center-right coalition gained power in Italy with the election victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement. As Tabucchi himself said of his novel, “those who didn’t love the Italian political situation took it as a symbol of resistance from within” (Cotroneo 1995: 105, my translation). Invested with this peculiarly Italian significance, Sostiene Pereira sold 300,000 copies within a year of publication.

Although favorably received by British and American reviewe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Translation, community, utopia
• 2 The difference that translation makes: the translator’s unconscious
• 3 Translating Derrida on translation: relevance and disciplinary resistance
• 4 Translating Jacopone da Todi: archaic poetries and modern audiences
• 5 Retranslations: the creation of value
• 6 How to read a translation
• 7 Local contingencies: translation and national identities
• 8 Translation, simulacra, resistance
• 9 Translations on the book market
• 10 Teaching in translation
• 11 The poet’s version; or, an ethics of translation
• 12 Translation studies and world literature
• 13 Translation trebled: Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper in English
• 14 Towards a translation culture
• Bibliography
• Index