The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

337 Pages·2008·1.1 MB·English

by  Lawrence Venuti

The Translator’s Invisibility
Praise for the fi rst edition:
“Of the many contributions to this fi eld that have appeared over the past two
decades, Lawrence Venuti’s new book is surely among the most important.”
Comparative Literature
Since publication over ten years ago, The Translator’s Invisibility has provoked
debate and controversy within the fi eld of translation and become a classic text.
Providing a fascinating account of the history of translation from the seventeenth
century to the present day, Venuti shows how fl uency prevailed over other translation
strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English and investigates the
cultural consequences of the domestic values which were simultaneously inscribed
and masked in foreign texts during this period. The author locates alternative
translation theories and practices in British, American and European cultures which
aim to communicate linguistic and cultural differences instead of removing them.
In this new edition of his work, Venuti:
• clarifi es and further develops key terms and arguments
• responds to criticisms
• incorporates new case studies that include: an eighteenth-century translation
of a French novel by a working-class woman; Richard Burton’s controversial
translation of the Arabian Nights; modernist poetry translation; translations
of Dostoevsky by the bestselling translators Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky; and translated crime fi ction
• updates data on the current state of translation, including publishing statistics
and translators’ rates.
The Translator’s Invisibility will be essential reading for students of translation
studies at all levels.
Lawrence Venuti is Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia.
He is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator and his recent
publications include The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference
and The Translation Studies Reader, both published by Routledge.

The Translator ’s Invisibility
A history of translation
Second edition
Lawrence Venuti
First published 1995
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Reprinted 2002
Second edition published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 1995, 2008 Lawrence Venuti
Typeset in Times New Roman by
HWA Text and Data Management, Tunbridge Wells
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Venuti, Lawrence.
The translator’s invisibility : a history of translation /
Lawrence Venuti Routledge. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Translating and interpreting—History. 2. English language—
Translating. I. Title.
P306.2.V46 2008
418’.0209—dc22 2007036668
ISBN10: 0–415–39453–8 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–39455–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–39453–6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–39455–0 (pbk)
For M.T.H.
Veis lo que es sin poder ser negado
veis lo que tenemos que aguantar,
mal que nos pese.

Contents
Preface viii
1 Invisibility 1
2 Canon 35
3 Nation 83
4 Dissidence 125
5 Margin 164
6 Simpatico 237
7 Call to action 265
Notes 278
Bibliography 286
Index 308
Preface
The Translator’s Invisibility originates in my own work as a professional translator
since the late 1970s. But any autobiographical elements are subsumed in what is
effectively a history of English-language translation from the seventeenth century
to the present. My project is to trace the origins of the situation in which every
English-language translator works today, although from an opposing standpoint,
with the explicit aim of locating alternatives, of changing that situation. The
historical narratives presented here span centuries and national literatures, but even
though based on detailed research, they are necessarily selective in articulating
key moments and controversies and frankly polemical in studying the past to
question the marginal position of translation in contemporary Anglo-American
culture. I imagine a diverse audience for the book, including translation theorists,
literary theorists and critics, period specialists in various literatures (English-
language and foreign), and reviewers of translations for periodicals, publishers,
private foundations, and government endowments. Most of all, I wish to speak
to translators and readers of translations, both professional and nonprofessional,
focusing their attention on the ways that translations are written and read and
urging them to think of new ones.
So I wrote in 1994, and in the intervening years my aims have not changed. For
the cultural situation in which I formulated them remains substantially the same,
regardless of the emergence of translation studies as an area of scholarly research
and the mushrooming of translator training programs worldwide. Translation
continues to be a largely misunderstood and relatively neglected practice, and the
working conditions of translators, whether they translate into English or into other
languages, have not undergone any signifi cant transformation. Indeed, in some
ways they have worsened.
My audience, however, has taken a different and truly unexpected shape. When
I was writing this book in the early 1990s, I did not quite know who might be
drawn to its arguments or even to its subject matter. My imagined readership was
in effect a utopian projection, a catalogue of the fi elds, disciplines, and institutions
that I felt were necessary to address in order to produce an appreciable change
in the current understanding and status of translation. Since I was based in an
Preface ix
English Department at a North American university, furthermore, I approached
translation from the standpoint of the issues that were then – and still are to a
large extent – driving research and debate in literary and cultural studies, notably
the idea of original authorship, the relations between language, subjectivity, and
ideology, concepts of gender, race, class, and nation as they infl uence cultural
forms and practices, the ethics and politics of cultural representations, the relations
between globalization and culture. My effort to consider translation in the context
of these issues in fact enabled the book to cross institutional boundaries, to reach
readers in a much wider range of fi elds and disciplines that included but went
beyond languages and literatures, stimulating debate and calling attention to the
crucial role played by translation in exchanges between cultures. The impact
was not only cross-disciplinary, but international, and the data and ideas have
informed discussions of translation outside of academia, in the popular media, in
government agencies, and in various kinds of cultural institutions, among writers
and translators.
Nonetheless, the very data and ideas that made possible this wide circulation
also complicated their reception. A reader’s particular cultural and institutional
site inevitably determined his or her response, and because the readership has
been so diverse, not every reader brought to the book the kinds of theoretical
assumptions, critical methodologies, and practical experiences that led me to write
it in the way that I did. As a result, it has been greeted by productive applications
and extensions, incisive criticisms, reductive misunderstandings, and outright
attacks, not least in the fl edgling fi eld of translation studies, where it has given
rise to controversy and provoked scholars to develop critiques that advance their
own approaches. These competing approaches have included various forms of
linguistics and discourse analysis (see e.g. Baker 2000: 23), “polysystem” theory
(Tymoczko 1999 and 2000), and a notion of “interculturality” based on a theory of
translation as “negotiation” and “transaction cost” (Pym 1997). Part of my motive
for writing the book was the failure of scholars in translation studies to consider
the issues that I wanted to raise; given the mixed reception within the fi eld, this
state of affairs has not changed as much as I had hoped.
It is primarily the reception of The Translator’s Invisibility that has created
the need for a second edition. I have taken this opportunity to update statistics
and fi gures and to clarify key terms and arguments. I have also developed some
arguments further by presenting new research, particularly on the translation of
prose fi ction, a genre that received less attention than poetry in the fi rst edition.
And throughout I have made revisions that take into account or seek to reply to
criticisms.
A project with the broad aims and scope of mine will necessarily come to rely
on the help of many people in different fi elds of literary, critical, and translatorly
expertise. Assembling the list of those who read, discussed, criticized, or otherwise
encouraged my work on the fi rst edition is a special pleasure, making me realize,
once again, how fortunate I was: Antoine Berman, Charles Bernstein, Shelly Brivic,
Ann Caesar, Steve Cole, Tim Corrigan, Pellegrino D’Acierno, Guy Davenport,