Lawrence Venuti
Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English, works in early modern literature, British, American, and foreign poetic traditions, translation theory and history, and literary translation. He is the author of Our Halcyon Dayes: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture (1989), The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), and The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998). He is the editor of the anthology of essays, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), and of The Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed. 2004), a survey of translation theory from antiquity to the present.
He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998) and the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000). Recent articles and reviews have appeared in New York Times Book Review, Performance Research, Translation and Literature, and Yale Journal of Criticism. He is a member of the editorial boards of Reformation: The Journal of the Tyndale Society and The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication. In 1998, he edited a special issue of The Translator devoted to translation and minority.
(Temple English)
Venuti, who championed the cause of the translator argued that the translator could do one of the two things: he could as he translates make himself invisible, which means that his target text reads fluently as a target text. This is the domesticating translation, which has no obvious traces or influence of the source language in it. The translator on the other hand could make himself visible, making it obvious that it is a translation, the linguistic traces of the alien thought movement that the source language is showing up. This is the foreignizing translation, which Venuti advocates.
Although Venuti is for the foreignizing type, he insists that rather than binary opposites, they are really ‘heuristic concepts…designed to promote thinking and research’. Essentially, domestication and foreignizing have to do with ‘the question of how much a translation assimilates a foreign language and culture, and how much it rather signals the differences of that text.’
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