Lawrence Venuti Venuti, Lawrence (1995a) The Translator’s Invisibility, London & New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference, London & New York: Routledge Venuti, Lawrence (2000) ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader, London & New York: Routledge, 468-488

Venuti’s setting Translation into English Literary texts past and present ‘Anglo-American culture’ Himself: American Italian translator & academic

Reasons for emphasis on literary translation Literary translation has long set the standard applied in technical translation (viz. fluency) It has traditionally been the field where innovative theories and practices emerge Decision to domesticate or foreignize allowed only to literary translators, because technical translation is fundamentally constrained by the exigencies/pressures of communication

Unequal power relations (i) Translation flows 2.4% of British book production 2.96% of American book production 8-12% of French book production 14.4% of German book production 25.4% of Italian book production …but flaw in argument (need to consider raw figures)

Unequal power relations (ii) Choice of what is translated Stereotypes, or canonical No strong data study

Translation strategies Domesticating Foreignizing An ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to Anglo-American target-language cultural values Dominating in Anglo-American translation culture Fluency preferred by publishers, readers, & reviewers Ethnocentric – imposes TC values Violent and unethical Invisibility of translators Marginalizing of translation Choosing a foreign text and developing a translation method along lines which are excluded by dominant cultural values in the target language Venuti’s preferred strategy Choice of marginal texts for TC Source-oriented translation Use of marginal TL discourses (minoritizing) Disrupting existing canons Act of resistancy [e.g. Tarchetti]

Assessment of Venuti’s model See Pym, A. (1996) ‘Venuti’s Visibility’, Target 8(2): 165-177.   (+) Translators as real people in political situations, related to their societies (socio-cultural contexts – cfr Toury) Quantitative aspects of translation policies  (-) No specific methodology to apply to the analysis of translation – case studies including a number of approaches Issues raised (domesticating / foreignizing / translator’s invisibility/power of publishers, etc) can be investigated in a variety of ways