1. 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,

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

3. 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

4. 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)

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

6. 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]

7. Assessment of Venuti’s model
See Pym, A. (1996) ‘Venuti’s Visibility’, Target 8(2):
(+)
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