Invisible translation in literary reviews E-Book

Jana Schäfer

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University College Dublin, course: Translation Theory, language: English, abstract: Translation of literary texts suffer always an ungrateful position in academic and cultural discourse. Generally, there are only two ways of treatment: no acknowledgment at all or criticism about the unfaithfulness. One can decide which way he prefers but translators todays are mostly praised for their invisibility and not for their actual work. This is especially the case in book reviews where the focus is on the meaning, thus the content of the book, instead on the translator’s work. Already in 1994 Lawrence Venuti wrote his influential essay about The Translator’s Invisibility concerning the focus on fluency in translation instead of a foreignization. Here, book reviews show exactly this trend. Nevertheless, the fact of being from another culture comes into account in their attempt of settling the book into their own culture. Linked to that is André Lefevere’s theory of literature as a system which he depicts in his essay Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature (1982). In my essay I would like to show how both Lefevere’s and Venuti’s concepts and criticism are internalised in contemporary book reviews and therefore in our (literary) culture in general. Concerning that, I will shortly present the theoretical background of Venuti and Lefevere with their most interesting points for literary criticism. Followed by that is the case study where I analyse three different literary reviews and finish with a contemporary translator dispute in newspapers. Thus, the invisibility of the translator as well as the disappearance of the source culture will be highlighted.

Leseprobe

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Inhalt

Introduction

Lawrence Venuti: The Translator’s Invisibility

André Lefevere: Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature

Case study: Book reviews today

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

Translation of literary texts suffer always an ungrateful position in academic and cultural discourse. Generally, there are only two ways of treatment: no acknowledgment at all or criticism about the unfaithfulness. One can decide which way he prefers but translators todays are mostly praised for their invisibility and not for their actual work. This is especially the case in book reviews where the focus is on the meaning, thus the content of the book, instead on the translator’s work. Already in 1994 Lawrence Venuti wrote his influential essay about The Translator’s Invisibility concerning the focus on fluency in translation instead of a foreignization. Here, book reviews show exactly this trend. Nevertheless, the fact of being from another culture comes into account in their attempt of settling the book into their own culture. Linked to that is André Lefevere’s theory of literature as a system which he depicts in his essay Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature (1982).

In my essay I would like to show how both Lefevere’s and Venuti’s concepts and criticism are internalised in contemporary book reviews and therefore in our (literary) culture in general. Concerning that, I will shortly present the theoretical background of Venuti and Lefevere with their most interesting points for literary criticism. Followed by that is the case study where I analyse three different literary reviews and finish with a contemporary translator dispute in newspapers. Thus, the invisibility of the translator as well as the disappearance of the source culture will be highlighted.

Lawrence Venuti: The Translator’s Invisibility

According to Venuti, the translator has a specific status within the literary system nowadays: he is hopefully invisible. Translation is a mass market in our globalized culture where the best read is a fluent one. Regarding that, the most important goal of the translation the focused on the meaning whereas the translator’s intervention is concealed:” “Invisibility” is the term I will use to describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture.” (Venuti 1). Here, the term ‘fluency’ becomes important since Venuti sees it as the most influential in Anglo-American culture today:

“A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” (Venuti 1).

Thus, he claims that a translation has to be fluent in order to be published. There are several discourse features which are important to gain this fluency. Generally speaking, all of them try to evoke the image of a work of the target culture. Thus, the translation attempts a modern style since otherwise the reader focuses on the language which is not important. Linked to the modern style is the usage of common words and a standard language. Hence, the reader experiences the work as from its own lingual background. Concerning the Anglophone communities, also Briticism or Americanism are avoided as well as any pidgin words or a foreign syntax. (see Venuti 4f.) The work is now part of the own language environment. However, there is an adaptation to age and nation concerning older translation but still with a focus on the target language.