{"id":1190,"date":"2010-10-10T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1190"},"modified":"2010-10-12T10:14:57","modified_gmt":"2010-10-12T08:14:57","slug":"the-translator%e2%80%99s-invisibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1190","title":{"rendered":"The translator's invisibility"},"content":{"rendered":"
The translator\u2019s invisibility:<\/strong> A history of translation. By Lawrence Venuti<\/strong>. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xii, 324. ISBN 9780415394550<\/a>. $35.95.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Janne Skaffari<\/strong><\/a>, University of Turku<\/em><\/p>\n

Lawrence Venuti\u2019s history of translation is more precisely a history of literary translation (mainly) into English in the last four hundred years, and a critique of the dominant translation strategies that aim at fluency and effortless intelligibility. V responds in this volume to criticism he received in 1995 for the controversial first edition and seeks to improve and update the discussion. The seven chapters incorporate extensive case studies of translations from the seventeenth century onwards.<\/p>\n

V introduces the key issues in Ch. 1, \u2018Invisibility\u2019 (1\u201334), dealing with the lowly status of translation in the U.S. and the U.K. He emphasizes that foreign texts tend to be domesticated or made to conform to the expectations of the receiving Anglophone culture through fluent and transparent translation. It renders the translator\u2019s work invisible to the readers, conceals cultural and linguistic dissimilarities between original texts and translations, and does violence to the source-language texts. This practice is traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Ch. 2, \u2018Canon\u2019 (35\u201382). While both classical literature and popular texts were translated to read naturally in English, they were also altered with contemporary social, political, and cultural values in mind. This recommended practice was not seen as producing inaccurate translations.<\/p>\n

The opposite practice is introduced in Ch. 3, \u2018Nation\u2019 (83\u2013124): the cultural and linguistic differences between the original and the translation are underscored rather than suppressed by foreignizing translation, a method that was not approved of in nineteenth century England, for example, but which is promoted by V himself. \u2018Dissidence\u2019, the title of Ch. 4 (125\u201363), refers to the preference for the marginal over the dominant in foreignizing translations. This is also a political and ideological act that can be achieved by adopting particular translation strategies and selecting \u2018deviant\u2019 foreign texts for translation.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 5, \u2018Margin\u2019 (164\u2013236), the modernism of the early twentieth century emerges as a potential turning point in the history of fluent translation: there was greater heterogeneity in both poetry and translations, but especially in the post-war era the more experimental translations still remained on the margin. V brings us closer to the present in Ch. 6, \u2018Simpatico<\/em>\u2019 (237\u201364): he uses some of his own work as examples of \u2018resistant\u2019, discontinuous and challenging rather than transparent translations of recent Italian poetry.<\/p>\n

The concluding Ch. 7, \u2018Call to action\u2019 (265\u201377), is considerably longer than in the first edition. It not only sums up the discussion and suggests directions for the future, but also includes a new discussion of foreignizing translation from the late nineteenth century. The bibliography (286\u2013307) has also been revised to include some eighty entries not available at the time of the original volume. While the second edition has been updated and many issues have been clarified, The translator\u2019s invisibility<\/em> is still a provocative book that serves to bring translation and translators out of the margin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The translator\u2019s invisibility: A history of translation. By Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xii, 324. ISBN 9780415394550. $35.95. Reviewed by Janne Skaffari, University of Turku Lawrence Venuti\u2019s history of translation is more precisely a history of literary translation (mainly) into English in the last four hundred years, and a critique of the dominant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1218,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190\/revisions\/1218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}