The Practices of Translation

Abstract

As commentators such as Brian Nelson have argued, literary translation is distinctive form of creative writing that constitutes a performance of the source text.1 The fact that there can exist different translations of a given literary work, for example, is proof enough of the creative role played by the translator. It demonstrates that the translator has choices - choices that are far from trivial, especially when it comes to dealing with words or concepts that are peculiar to the source culture and foreign to the target readership. Thus, while translation is undoubtedly an art, as a recent number of this journal highlighted,2 it is also a value-laden activity, as it forces the practitioner to adopt a stance with respect to otherness: to acknowledge and emphasize it, thereby challenging the habits and expectations of the target culture; or to deny and transform it by minimizing or erasing the text's foreignness in order to make it conform to the norms of the receiving culture. As this dilemma indicates, the challenges confronted by the translator raise important questions, not just about what we might term the mechanics of translation but more generally, on an ideological level, about the ways in which the cultural distinctiveness of texts is approached.3This ideological dimension is inescapable, and is indeed integral to the process, since translation necessarily involves the confrontation of different discursive practices. As Clem Robyns notes:The simple fact that a text is written in something other than the common language is already a radical challenge to the conventions of a target discourse. Since the awareness of common norms constitutes the basis for discursive self-definition, the of convention-violating elements is a potential threat. Therefore, every discourse is continually forced to determine its position(s) toward such alien elements, hence toward translation.4There are various ways in which a particular discursive community can react to this potential code violation, to this intrusion of the alien, that translation encapsulates. Berman, for instance, argues that, in order to be properly ethical, the act of translation must resist the temptation to naturalize those elements that are alien and receive the foreign as foreign. To do otherwise, in his view, is to be annexationist and to fall into the trap of reinforcing a culture's ethnocentricity. It is this systeme de deformation, argues Berman, that has prevented too many translated texts from confronting what he calls the epreuve de l'etranger.5 Lawrence Venuti likewise denounces the domesticating tendency that he sees as being generally prevalent in literary translation, suggesting instead that:A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures.6As eloquently presented as the arguments of Berman and Venuti may be, the position they extol nevertheless represents just one of the possible approaches to translation, and one of the more Utopian approaches at that. In the world of publishing, ethics inevitably have to compete with a number of other, more powerful factors, most notably market forces. In this context, the transformation or naturalization of a text for a new readership is often considered to be a necessity rather than just one of a number of options. It is hardly surprising, then, to note that, in the field of translation studies, a number of theories have been developed that actually take as their premise the translator's need to transform or deform the original text. In the late 1970s, for example, two particularly influential theories were developed in order to account, precisely, for the decisions made by translators and their publishers as they seek to ensure that the translated text is favourably received by the target culture and thus in the target market. …