Abstract
The aim of this article is to look more closely at Lawrence Venuti’s approach to translation as cultural politics. It is interesting to observe who has had the greatest influence on this leading contemporary translation scholar, and what has been his main aim over practically two decades. Looking at how he has challenged the Anglo-American cultural dominance in translation policy leads us to make a more detailed analysis of how we approach our own task as a translator and how we differentiate between foreignization and domestication. In the process we have the possibility to see to what extent Venuti’s views, when put into practice, can achieve the desired goal. This will be done on the basis of three works, one in verse and two in prose, of three Polish literati and their English translations. All three works have the highly politically loaded word donosy in their titles.
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Notes
- 1.
The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Hayvaert (1992).
- 2.
“Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”, trans. L. Venuti (2000). All following quotations will be from the English translation.
- 3.
This will in turn be taken up by Venuti as a key phrase being, as he perceives it, a reflection of Anglo-American translation practice. For a detailed presentation of this issue see Venuti’s article “Translation as Cultural Politics” (1993) which has been recently reprinted in Mona Baker’s Critical Readings in Translation Studies (2010).
- 4.
The expression ‘trial of the foreign’ Berman borrowed from Heidegger who used it to define a “poetic experience in Hölderlin (Die Erfahrung des Fremden)” (For this and further explanation see Berman 2000: 284–285).
- 5.
See, for example, Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, especially the second chapter entitled “The System: patronage” (Lefevere 1992: 11–25).
- 6.
This is followed by a quotation from Jan de Waard and Eugene Nida’s From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating: “the receptors of a translation should comprehend the translated text to such an extent that they can understand how the original receptors must have understood the original text” (1986: 36).
- 7.
See, for example, the elucidating subtitle to Venuti’s The Scandals of Translation. Towards an ethics of difference (Venuti 1998).
- 8.
For an interesting presentation of Venuti’s view on American publishing policy see, for example, The Scandals of Translation. Towards an ethics of difference (1998), Chapter 4: “The Formation of Cultural Identities”, pp. 67–87.
- 9.
This was later published together with his Opowiadanie (1981) in his collected works (Vol. II) as Opowiadanie i Donosy 1980–1989 (1992).
- 10.
This and all further English translations are mine.
- 11.
These English translations of Białoszewski’s Donosy … first appeared in Explorations in Polish-English Mistranslation Problems (1998). Apart from a few minor changes, worth noting is the new title: Reports on Reality instead of the earlier Telling Tales. For more on the reasons for such a choice see pp. 123–126.
References
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Korzeniowska, A. (2013). Lawrence Venuti in Reference to Polish-English Translation and Cultural Politics. In: Piątkowska, K., Kościałkowska-Okońska, E. (eds) Correspondences and Contrasts in Foreign Language Pedagogy and Translation Studies. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00161-6_11
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