2021-04-14 10th Lecturer - Discussion of Venuti's Work.pptx 0.080 Mb

1. Discussion of Venuti’s work
Presented by
Dr. Nighat Ahmed
Department of English (UGS)
NUML, Islamabad
BS-English (Afternoon)
Course = Introduction to
Translation Studies
7th Semester
Section A,B & C
Semester : Spring 2021
10th Lecture (Online)

2. Discussion
Venuti’s analysis of the Anglo-American publishing
hegemony seems to tie in with the power relations of the
post colonial world. According to him, the percentages of
translation published in the UK and the USA seems to be
low, around 2.5 percent or 3 percent of the total books
published. Venuti asserts that for many authors writing in
other languages, the benchmark of success is to be
translated into English. But the publishers in the UK and
USA tend to choose works that are easily assimilated into
the target culture.

3. Venuti sees the imbalance as yet another example of
cultural hegemony of the Anglo-American publishing and
culture which is very insular and refuses to accept the
foreign yet is happy for its own works to maintain a strong
hold in other countries.
Venuti expresses this in damning terms in his book:
Rethinking Translation: Discourse, subjectivity Ideology
(1992) in the following words:
“Anglo-American publishing has been instrumental in
producing readers who are aggressively monolingual
and culturally parochial while reaping the economic
benefits of successfully imposing Anglo-American
cultural values on a sizeable foreign readership”.
Hence, market forces reinforce and even determine these
trends.

4. Summary
The key term for Venuti ‘invisibility’.
This refers to how in Anglo-American cultures, the foreign
is made invisible both by publishing strategies and the
preference for a ‘fluent’ TT that erases traces of the
foreign. Venuti discusses two strategies ‘domesticating’
and ‘foreignizing’. However he favours the latter in a policy
of ‘resistance’ to the dominant ethnocentric violent values
of publishers and literary reviewers.