Venuti and the invisibility of the translator. Domestication and foreignization

1. Venuti and the invisibility of the translator.
Domestication and foreignization
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
9th Lecture (Online)

2. Venuti: the cultural and political agenda of translation.
Like other cultural theorists, Venuti insists that the scope
of translation studies needs to be broadened to take
account of value-driven nature of the sociocultural
framework.
In addition to governments and other politically motivated
institutions, which may decide to censor or promote
certain works, Venuti refers to the various players in the
publishing industry as well.
These would be the publishers and editors who choose
the works and commission the translations, pay the
translators and often dictate the translation method.

3. These may also include the literary agents, sales teams
and reviewers. The reviewers’ comments indicate and
determine how translations are read and received in the
target culture. Each of these players have particular
position and a role. The translators themselves are part of
that culture, which they can either accept or rebel
against.
Venuti and the ‘invisibility’ of the translator.
Invisibility is a term used by Venuti to describe the
translator’s situation and activity in contemporary
Anglo-American culture. Venuti sees the invisibility as
follows:

4. 1. By the way, translators themselves tend to translate
fluently’ into English, to produce an idiomatic and
‘readable’ TT, thus creating an ‘illusion of
transparency’.
2. Besides the way, the translated texts are typically read
in the target culture. Venuti asserts that a translated
text whether prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction is
judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and
readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of
any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seems
transparent….giving the appearance in other words
that the translation is not infact a translation but the
original.

5. Domestication and foreignization
Venuti discusses invisibility hand in hand with two types
of translating strategy: domestication and foreignization.
These strategies concern both the choice of text to
translate and the translation method.
Venuti sees domestication as dominating Anglo-
American translation culture. He bemoans the
phenomenon of domestication since it involves an
‘ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to (Anglo-
American) target cultural values. This entails translating
in a transparent, fluent, invisible’ style in order to
minimize the foreigners of the TT.

6. Domestication further covers adherence to domestic
literary canons by carefully selecting the texts that are
likely to lend themselves to such a translation strategy.
Foreignization on the other hand entails choosing a
foreign text and developing a translation method along
lines which are excluded by dominant cultural values in
the target language. It is described as a translation
strategy where the translator leaves the writer alone, as
much as possible and moves the reader towards the
writer.

7. The foreignizing method of translating, a strategy Venuti
also terms ‘resistancy’ is a non-fluent or estranging
translation style designed to make visible the presence
of the translator by highlighting the foreign identity of the
ST and protecting it from the ideological dominance of
the target culture.
Venuti concludes that terms may change meaning
across time and location. What does not change
however, is that domestication and foreignization deal
with the question of how much a translation assimilates a
foreign text to the translating language and culture and
how much it rather signals the difference of that text: