The Translator’s Invisibility

Since publication over twenty years ago, The Translator’s Invisibility has pro-
voked debate and controversy within the field of translation and become a classic
text. Providing a fascinating account of the history of translation from the sev-
enteenth century to the present day, Venuti shows how fluency prevailed over
other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English and
investigates the cultural consequences of the receptor values which were simulta-
neously inscribed and masked in foreign texts during this period. Reissued with
a new introduction, in which the author provides a clear, detailed account of key
concepts and arguments in order to issue a counterblast against simplistic inter-
pretations, The Translator’s Invisibility takes its well-deserved place as part of the
Routledge Translation Classics series. This book is essential reading for students
of translation studies at all levels.

Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English at Temple University, is a translation

theorist and historian as well as a translator. He is, most recently, the author of
Translation Changes Everything (2013), and the editor of The Translation Studies
Reader (2012) and Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies (2016),
all published by Routledge.
The Translator’s Invisibility

A History of Translation

Lawrence Venuti
This edition reissued in Routledge Translation Classics series 2018
by Routledge
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First edition published by Routledge 1995
Second edition published by Routledge 2008
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
Names: Venuti, Lawrence, author.
Title: The translator’s invisibility : a history of translation / Lawrence
Venuti.
Description: Third edition. | New York : Routledge, [2018] | Reissue of
  the 2008 publication. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048322| ISBN 9781138298286 (hardcover) |
  ISBN 9781138093164 (softcover) | ISBN 9781315098746 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting—History. | English
  language—Translating.
Classification: LCC P306.2 .V46 2018 | DDC 418/.02—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048322
ISBN: 978-1-138-29828-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-09316-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-09874-6 (ebk)
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 For M.T.H.

Ve i s l o q u e es s i n p oder se r ne ga do
v e is lo q u e ten em os q u e a gua nt ar,
m al q u e n os p es e.
Contents

Introduction: Conditions of Possibility viii

Preface xx

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
Introduction
Conditions of Possibility

Originating in a 1986 article that sought to demystify translation practices, the

first edition of The Translator’s Invisibility (1995) broadened that piece into an
archivally based history of the current state of English-language translation. At
a distance of more than thirty years, the project appears very much as a product
of a particular moment: its theoretical concepts, historiographical principles,
and methods of textual analysis were enabled by the various discourses that deci-
sively informed research in literary and cultural studies during the 1980s in the
United Kingdom and the United States. Varieties of Marxism, ­psychoanalysis,
feminism, and poststructuralism formed an uneasy, heterogeneous synthesis
drawn primarily from the work of French thinkers, notably Louis Althusser
and Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault
and Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I was deeply influenced
by this work, especially through the English translations that were streaming
from trade and academic publishers from the 1970s onward, and I learned
a great deal from the ways it was developed and deployed by such theorists
and critics as Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, Jean-Jacques Lecercle and
Anthony Giddens, Catherine Belsey and Antony Easthope, Philip E. Lewis and
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. This theoretical conjuncture has long passed, but in
generating my project it made possible a perspective on translation that
­continues to be not only cited as a point of reference, but also disputed in
sometimes heated discussion.
To enlist such diverse materials in the study of translation cannot exactly be
called “extrapolating” or “applying” them to a different cultural practice. On
the contrary, I was required to reformulate ideas and methods so that they might
illuminate what translation is and does. Easthope’s argument that the illusion
of linguistic transparency has dominated English poetic traditions since the
early modern period inspired a crucial breakthrough: I saw that it could be
used to describe the illusionistic effects of fluent translation, where the cur-
rent standard dialect of the translating language along with linear syntax and
univocal meaning creates an easy readability that masks the translator’s work,
leading the reader to believe that the translation is actually the source text.
Althusser’s concept of symptomatic reading was similarly useful in dispelling
 Introduction  ix

the mystifications produced by fluent translation. If, for him, discontinuities in

theoretical texts reveal ideological determinations that respond to the social
contradictions of a specific historical period, then discontinuities between the
source and translated texts or within the translated text at the level of dic-
tion, syntax, and discourse might reveal the ideological significance of the
translator’s work in relation to the hierarchy of linguistic and cultural values
in the receiving situation. Such reformulations not only established the perti-
nence of particular ideas and methods to translation; they also questioned the
theoretical discourses driving literary and cultural studies. Those discourses,
despite the importance of translation to a thinker like Derrida, have been rou-
tinely used to study original compositions, almost never translations, and so
they implicitly maintained literary canons while reinforcing the romantic con-
cept of original authorship that has done so much to marginalize translation
research and practice.
The theoretical synthesis that enabled The Translator’s Invisibility differed
markedly from the discourses that came to dominate translation studies during
the 1980s. The ideas and methods that received the widest circulation in the field,
whether through teaching or through research projects, were derived from varie-
ties of linguistics, on the one hand, including systemic-functional linguistics, dis-
course analysis, and pragmatics, and from polysystem theory, on the other hand,
developed from the work of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic
Circle. These two approaches, which at times were seen as complementary but at
others opposed, underpin the books that exerted the most influence in that period
and subsequently. Mona Baker’s In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation
(1992) and Basil Hatim and Ian Mason’s The Translator as Communicator (1997)
offered an expanded array of linguistics-oriented tools for translation analysis and
practice, while André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of
Literary Fame (1992) and Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies – and
Beyond (1995) elaborated cultural terms by means of which a systemic orientation
can be implemented in the study of translation.
“Descriptive,” in fact, might be taken as the watchword of this varied body
of work. It assumes the application of the scientific method. Whether linguistic
categories are used to differentiate kinds of “equivalence” between the source and
translated texts or sociological concepts like “norms” and “constraints” are used
to account for the production of translations, the professed aim is not to evaluate
but to describe and explain the nature of translation as well as the behavior of
translators. Hence, whenever the concept of ideology is invoked in this research, it
tends to be treated neutrally as autonomous “ideas” or “values” that are intention-
ally expressed in language. In The Translator’s Invisibility, however, following
the theoretical discourses in literary and cultural studies, ideology is conceived
as an ensemble of values, beliefs, and representations that are inscribed in lan-
guage without the user’s awareness or control, and that maintain or challenge the
hierarchies in which social groups are positioned, thereby serving the interests of
specific groups. Ideology is thus indistinguishable from value judgment, it is a
x  Introduction

quintessentially political concept, and it turns the analysis of translated texts into
a critique of their politics made from a different, usually opposing ideological
standpoint. The so-called descriptive discourses that have dominated translation
studies regard ideological critique as “prescriptive” insofar as it recommends cer-
tain translation theories and practices over others and takes particular positions in
political struggles.
Yet the claim of value-free translation research is spurious. Any theoretical dis-
course creates translation as an object for a specific kind of knowledge through the
ideas and methods that characterize that discourse. Modelling translation research
on the natural sciences fails to recognize that conceptual parameters determine
which hypotheses are formulated, and which empirical data are selected to verify
or falsify them while excluding different parameters, hypotheses, and data that
may actually question the research. As a result, the misguided belief that fact
can be separated from value in a fundamentally humanistic field like translation
studies winds up privileging dominant theoretical discourses. Far from present-
ing comprehensive and incisive accounts of translation, descriptive translation
studies is itself ideological, scientistic in assuming a naïve empiricism, conserv-
ative in reinforcing the academic status quo, and anti-intellectual in blocking the
introduction of materials from other fields and disciplines that would expose its
limitations.
The theoretical discourses that enabled The Translator’s Invisibility were
undoubtedly constraining as well. It criticized rather than formulated concepts
of equivalence; it analyzed translated texts with the forms of discourse analysis
that accompanied poststructuralism, foregrounding the construction and position-
ing of subjectivity through language and ideology; and it distinguished between
norms or constraints and ideologies so that the former can themselves be viewed
as ideological through their institutional and social affiliations. My primary inter-
est lay in those areas that translation studies had been forced to neglect by its own
theoretical discourses: the ethics and politics of translation.
Not surprisingly, this book has proven to be controversial. The principal
arguments concerning the ethical effects of translated texts, particularly the
importance of registering linguistic and cultural differences and the history of
suppressing those differences in Anglophone translation traditions – these points
have been debated in the many humanistic disciplines that rely on translations for
their teaching and research, including not only classical and modern languages,
comparative literature, drama, and film, but also anthropology, history, philoso-
phy, and sociology. The centrality I give to translators, to their selection of source
texts and their development of translation strategies, to the question of whether
they should remain invisible in a translation, and to their cultural marginality and
the unfavorable legal and economic conditions under which they work – these
points have been deliberated by professional translators within and outside of the
academy as well as by faculty and students in programs that train translators and
future scholars of translation. The book has been translated, furthermore, in whole
or in part, into a number of languages, including Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese,
 Introduction  xi

Chinese, French, Italian, and Malaysian. To be capable of reaching this varied

readership my project must be intelligible even if readers are not conversant with
the theoretical discourses that animate it or with recent developments in transla-
tion studies. Possessing that sort of familiarity has not, in any case, guaranteed
nuanced appreciation or general acceptance of my concepts and arguments, which
seem to have been admired and denigrated in equal measure.
This contentious reception indicates that the publisher’s designation of The
Translator’s Invisibility as a “translation classic” is likely to be greeted with cor-
respondingly divergent reactions, ranging from measured approval for recogniz-
ing its influence on translation commentary to cynical dismissal as repackaging
intended to stimulate sales. Of course, any cultural form or practice can support
multiple and conflicting interpretations, each of which might encounter assent or
disagreement with different readerships. To undergo the validation implied by the
term “classic,” however, is to be admitted to a canon, where a text is seen as wor-
thy of continuing interpretation so that every interpretive act is simultaneously
an evaluation. Ascriptions of meaning and value are mutually dependent in any
decision as to canonicity, reciprocally creating and justifying each other, whether
the evaluation is decidedly positive or ultimately negative.
Has my book become one of those texts that, as Frank Kermode wrote in The
Classic (1975), “possess intrinsic qualities that endure, but possess also an openness
to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions”?
I would be inclined to answer, “Perhaps, but not quite in these terms,” since the
reception I have witnessed requires Kermode’s notion of what is a “classic” to be
rethought. The concepts and arguments I advance have not endured as if they were
unchanging essences precisely because they have been made to accommodate the
varying assumptions, expectations, interests, and abilities that readers have brought
to their interactions with the text. If I address issues in translation theory, history, and
practice that have come to be regarded as deserving of consideration, my account of
them has certainly not been comprehended and judged in the same way in every time
and place. Whether this point makes the book a classic, I leave to the reader to decide.
As the circle of interpretation and evaluation has continued to turn, certain
patterns of reception have emerged. Summaries in reviews, textbooks, and popu-
larizations have been selective: they display a tendency to emphasize the overall
account of the project in the first chapter, “Invisibility,” focusing on such concepts
as “fluency” and “resistancy” and the differences between “domesticating” and
“foreignizing” translation. This tendency often coincides with neglect of the case
studies in the remaining chapters, where the arguments are constructed with tex-
tual analyses and archival evidence that show how the concepts change in specific
cultural situations at specific historical moments. Consequently, The Translator’s
Invisibility has been subjected to grossly oversimplifying readings that have in
some cases been based on equally simplistic second-hand treatments, but that
have nonetheless shaped the impact of the book.
I do not want to suggest that the interpretations in question are merely wrong
or imprecise, even in cases where their reductiveness can readily be demonstrated.
xii  Introduction

If any text can be interpreted in multiple and contradictory ways, evaluating inter-
pretations is less a matter of truth as an accurate representation of the text than
a matter of ethics, of how interpreters take responsibility for the forceful act that
interpretation is, especially when their interpretations devolve into dismissively
superficial readings and self-congratulatory promotions of their own research
and experience. In addition, I myself reinterpreted points in preparing the second
revised edition (2008) so as to clarify and develop them further, perhaps inad-
vertently adding to any confusion caused by the arguments I initially formulated.
What might usefully introduce this reprint of the second edition, then, is to high-
light key concepts and arguments, although with the proviso that my account will
undoubtedly reflect my developing understanding of the project. My goal is not
just to issue a counterblast to oversimplifications, but also to release the produc-
tive potential of the research, particularly for a new generation of readers who are
coming to it for the first time.
Hence I present these three theses:

1. All translation, regardless of genre or text type, including translation that

seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences, is an interpretation
that fundamentally domesticates the source text.

Translation is inevitably domesticating insofar as it aims to interpret the

source text in terms that are intelligible and interesting in the receiving situ-
ation. It manages the linguistic and cultural differences that pose obstacles to
intelligibility and interest through a twofold process of assimilation. On the
one hand, translation decontextualizes the source text by detaching it from the
multidimensional contexts of production and reception in its original language
and culture, contexts that are at once intratextual and intertextual, interdiscur-
sive and intermedial, institutional and social. On the other hand, translation
simultaneously recontextualizes the source text by constructing another, com-
parable set of contexts in the translating language and culture. This assimila-
tive process constitutes an interpretive act in which the source text undergoes
a significant transformation. The interpretation is transformative because it is
made through the application of a third category consisting of what I call inter-
pretants, formal and thematic factors that include a relation of equivalence
and a particular style as well as values, beliefs, and representations. Interpre-
tants are essential to translation: they are applied in translating humanistic,
pragmatic, or technical texts, although they vary according to genre and text
type, discourse and function. The source text is transformed even when the
translator makes a rigorous effort to maintain a semantic correspondence and
stylistic approximation because the interpretants, although they may contain
source-cultural materials, are drawn predominantly from the receiving situ-
ation. It is there that the decision to translate is often made, especially with
humanistic texts, so that the assimilative process starts with the very choice of
a source text that reflects what is intelligible and interesting to receptors.
 Introduction  xiii

A translation that seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences – a transla-

tion, in other words, that is “foreignizing” – does not escape the inevitable domes-
tication. It must produce its foreignizing effects in terms that can be recognized as
differential by readers of the translating language, and so it must apply interpre-
tants that are specific to the receiving situation. The retention of source-text words
and phrases in a translation, to take a verbal choice that is frequently regarded as
foreignizing, can signal a linguistic and cultural difference by suggesting that the
text in which it occurs is a translation of a text written in a different language.
Nonetheless, the reader’s experience of foreignness in this case depends upon a
context that is composed mainly of the translating language and its network of
connections to the receiving situation. Any sense of foreignness in a translation is
always already domesticated, even if differential.
Among the corollaries that can be inferred from these points, two deserve special
emphasis. First, and perhaps most importantly, no translation can provide direct or
unmediated access to the source text. Any text is only ever available through some
sort of mediation that is most productively seen as a succession of interpretations
in various forms and practices, media and institutions – even before it becomes a
source text that receives a translator’s interpretation. As a result, any sense of for-
eignness in a translation can never be more than a construction overdetermined by
the receiving situation: it is not the foreignness of the source text itself, but rather a
foreignism that is, moreover, subject to variation, depending on the changing cul-
tural situations and historical moments of various interpreters and translators. For
this reason, I prefer to describe the linguistic and cultural differences perceptible
in a foreignizing translation as “registered” or “signaled” therein, words that can
imply mediation or indirection. I want to avoid the use of words like “preserved”
or “communicated,” which can imply exact reproduction or untroubled transfer.
The second corollary: to treat the distinction between domesticating and
foreignizing translation as a simple “dichotomy” or “binary opposition” is
to eliminate entirely its conceptual complexity. That distinction is designed to
acknowledge that translation is a mediating practice while allowing for different,
even opposed kinds of mediation. I would want to distinguish, at the very least,
between translations that are domesticating, exoticizing, or foreignizing in their
overall impact, where “exoticizing” registers a superficial sense of difference that
can easily play into cultural or ethnic stereotypes. What allows a foreignizing
translation, furthermore, to limit and redirect its inevitable domestication is not its
orientation toward or adherence to the source text, but rather the translator’s com-
mand and application of certain linguistic and cultural resources in the receiving
situation. It is the effects of those resources that potentially exceed mere domesti-
cation and become differential.

2. The terms “domesticating” and “foreignizing” do not describe specific

verbal choices or discursive strategies used in translation, but rather the
ethical effects of translated texts that depend for their force and recogni-
tion on the receiving culture.
xiv  Introduction

The interpretants by which the translator transforms the source text into the
translation are derived from the hierarchical arrangement of linguistic and cul-
tural resources in the receiving situation. By “hierarchical” I mean that these
resources are not assigned the same value and prestige: some are dominant while
others are marginal with various gradations between these poles. The current
standard dialect of the translating language, canons of literary and other human-
istic texts, authoritative interpretations of those texts, prevalent translation the-
ories and strategies – all exemplify dominant resources. Any cultural situation
also involves ideologies, values, beliefs, and representations that are likewise
arranged hierarchically, even though they may be affiliated with diverse groups
who themselves occupy varying positions in social hierarchies. Domesticating
translation derives its interpretants from dominant resources and ideologies,
which because of their very dominance are likely to be immediately accessible,
familiar, possibly assuring, whereas foreignizing translation derives its inter-
pretants from marginal resources and ideologies, which because of their very
marginality may be less readily comprehensible, somewhat peculiar, and even
estranging. A translator can certainly combine a range of interpretants from these
poles or gradations in between, but a highly diversified combination does not
make a translation more meaningful, just, or pluralistic. It may in fact undermine
the ethical impact of the translation.
For “domesticating” and “foreignizing” are ethical effects whereby translation
establishes a performative relation both to the source text and to the receiving situ-
ation. Domesticating translation not only validates dominant resources and ideol-
ogies, but also extends their dominance over a text written in a different language
and culture, assimilating its differences to receiving materials. Thus domesticat-
ing translation maintains the status quo, reaffirming linguistic standards, literary
canons, and authoritative interpretations, fostering among readers who esteem
such resources and ideologies a cultural narcissism that is sheer self-satisfaction.
In terms of an intercultural ethics, it is bad in reinforcing the asymmetry between
cultures that is inherent in translation. Foreignizing translation, in drawing on
marginal resources and ideologies, carries the potential to challenge the dominant,
as well as the cultural and social hierarchies that structure the receiving situation.
It seeks to respect the differences of the source text, but because translation is
inevitably domesticating in enacting an assimilative process, those differences
can be signaled only through the indirect means of deviating from the dominant
by employing the marginal. Foreignizing translation is most effective when it is
innovative, when it departs from institutionalized knowledge and practices by
stimulating new kinds of thinking and writing, making a difference that is crea-
tive. In ethical terms, it is good in turning the asymmetrical relation built by trans-
lation into an interrogation of the culture that receives the source text – although
in the process that text as well may be interrogated, shown to possess limitations
that complicate its significance in both the source and translating cultures.
Once again, these points enable the inference of useful corollaries. First, the dis-
cursive strategies used in translation bear no necessary ethical value because they
 Introduction  xv

are developed in response to changing cultural situations and historical moments

and in relation to different source texts. Fluency is not in itself domesticating;
the problem is rather posed by fluent strategies that are narrowly restricted to the
current standard dialect of the translating language. In producing an illusionistic
effect of transparency, any fluent strategy conceals the translator’s inscription of
an interpretation through the application of receiving cultural resources and ide-
ologies. But a translation that expands the parameters of fluency to encompass
marginal resources, that admits non-standard linguistic items like regional and
social dialects, slang and obscenity, archaism and jargon, loanwords and neolo-
gisms, can introduce a perceptible difference in the translator’s interpretation of
the source text, a difference that should not be arbitrary but grounded on source-
text features as the translator interprets them in a particular cultural situation.
Given the dominance of fluent strategies that remain chiefly within the confines of
the standard dialect, the most familiar form of the translating language, the inclu-
sion of non-standard items can make the translator visible in the translated text.
It leads to a strategy that can be called “resistancy,” not just because the strategy
results in a translation that demands greater and possibly unexpected cognitive
processing from the reader, but also because it questions the dominant resources
and ideologies that are put to work in domesticating translation.
Thus a second corollary: foreignizing translation cannot be reduced to liter-
alism, or close adherence to the source text. This discursive strategy can be of
use with certain language pairs and source texts, but too often, especially in rigid
applications, it tends to result in awkward, unidiomatic writing, so-called transla-
tionese, which cannot serve the ethical effects of foreignizing translation. To for-
eignize is to alter the way in which a translation is customarily read by disclosing
its translated status as well as the translator’s intervention. To produce this effect
compellingly, however, the translation must also be legible enough to be pleasur-
able, qualities preempted by translationese. Foreignizing translation can change
the conditions of readability only if the translator takes an approach that is at once
writerly and scholarly, developing a broad stylistic repertoire so as to interpret the
source text against dominant forms, practices, traditions, and interpretations in the
receiving situation.
As a result, a foreignizing effect can be produced through a variety of means,
through the mere choice of a source text as well as the development of innova-
tive strategies. A source text can run counter to, and thereby question, entrenched
patterns of selection that have given rise to canons of translated texts, possibly
hardening into stereotypical representations of the source culture. The choice of
text is foreignizing when it insinuates a difference in how readers in the receiv-
ing situation understand that culture. In the case of pragmatic and technical texts
where function is a principal interpretant, such that an instruction manual or an
apartment lease must serve the same purpose in both the source and the translating
cultures, the basis of a foreignizing effect varies with the text type: it may involve
discursive strategies that challenge dominant cultural stereotypes, such as with a
travel guidebook, or it may focus on the function of the translation and its social
xvi  Introduction

conditions. A translation of a lease that enables an immigrant to rent an apartment

can make interpretive moves that specifically acknowledge the minority status
of the immigrant population by taking into account the cultural origins of that
population as well as its language while increasing the cultural diversity of the
receiving situation. With an instruction manual that results in exploitative labor
practices or environmental devastation, no interpretation that simply supports the
function of the source text can redeem the social consequences of the translation.
The ethical choice would be to decline to take on the project.
These examples suggest a third corollary: although my project focuses on
Anglophone cultures and their translation histories, fluency based on the current
standard dialect is a discursive regime that dominates translation worldwide,
regardless of the translating language and its position in the global hierarchy of
symbolic and cultural capital. It is not only major languages like English and
French, then, that practice domesticating translation, fostering cultures that are
ripe for foreignizing effects. Minor languages also erect hierarchies of cultural
resources and ideologies that can lead to domesticating translation, inviting the
development of foreignizing projects that both interrogate those hierarchies and
build the translating language and culture through innovative practices.

3. Not only does the translator perform an interpretive act, but readers must
also learn how to interpret translations as translations, as texts in their
own right, in order to perceive the ethical effects of translated texts.

Determining the ethical effects of a translation requires an interpretation in

which it is analyzed in relation not only to the source text but also to the con-
juncture of factors in the receiving situation. The hierarchy of cultural resources
and ideologies, the origin of the translator’s interpretants, must be reconstructed
so as to understand how verbal choices constitute interpretive moves that can
carry ethical force. This reconstruction is necessarily based on detailed historical
research into language use, cultural canons, translation practices, and ideological
ensembles, particularly as they might figure into exchanges between the source
and translating cultures. The terms “domesticating” and “foreignizing,” therefore,
should never be treated as labels that are affixed to translations merely on the
strength of the discursive strategies they implement. The ethical significance of
these terms can be defined only within specific contexts of interpretation.
Discontinuities between the source and translated texts can serve as a basis
from which to infer the formal and thematic factors guiding the translator’s inter-
pretation. Yet any such inference involves several complicated steps that are nec-
essary but usually overlooked during the comparisons that are typically made
between the two texts. To locate discontinuities, the analyst must first fix the form
and meaning of the source text and then formulate a relation of equivalence that
can be used to gauge the extent to which the translated text has deviated from that
form and meaning. Any relation of equivalence requires that a unit of translation
be specified, a segment of the source text to which a segment of the translation
 Introduction  xvii

is expected to correspond. The unit can be the individual word, phrase, sentence,
paragraph, chapter, or the entire text, among other possibilities, each of which
can lead to a different translation of the same source text and therefore affect the
evaluation of whether a translation is equivalent.
Clearly, every step in this analysis consists of an interpretive act. The analyst of
a translation, like the translator of a source text, applies a set of interpretants, which
are derived partly from the reconstruction of the receiving situation and partly from
the analyst’s own interpretive occasion, the theoretical, historical, or practical point
that has been chosen to guide the analysis – such as determining the ethical effects
of a translation in its historical moment. Any interpretation, however, should be
regarded as provisional, since both the source text and the translation can support
many, conflicting interpretations, and the analysis can unfold differently according
to different interpretive occasions. A consensus can arise concerning the ethical
effects of a translation, or continuing debate may preempt a consensus as different
contexts of interpretation are advanced to analyze the source and translated texts.
A broader context can be created, for instance, by establishing axes of compar-
ison that are both diachronic and synchronic. The historical reconstruction might
encompass corpora of translations, translation projects that precede and coincide
with the project under consideration, involving the same or different source lan-
guages, so that its relation to translation practices past and present might be elu-
cidated. Contemporary reviews of a particular translation might be examined for
evidence of domesticating or foreignizing effects, which can be detected not only
in reviews that explicitly mention the translation by referring to the choice of
source text or the translating language and style, but also in those reviews that
do not refer to the translation as such, treating it instead as if it were the source
text. In this case, comments that a reviewer naively believes to apply to the source
text can indicate how familiar or peculiar the translation seems to readers in the
receiving situation who lack the source language.
If a foreignizing translation is to be regarded as effective, such readers too should
somehow make an effort to perceive the linguistic and cultural differences that it
registers insofar as these differences represent an ethical value that bears on an inter-
cultural relation. Yet readers without the source language would be unable to pursue
the sort of scholarly analysis I have been describing thus far; even those who know
the language are likely to be reluctant to pursue it because their interest in the trans-
lation may be limited to readerly pleasure. Fluent translation, moreover, whether
restricted to the current standard dialect of the translating language or expanded
to encompass non-standard items, is powerful in producing the illusionistic effect
of transparency that allows a translation to pass for its source text, inviting readers
to remain within the illusionism during and after their reading experience. Trans-
lations, nonetheless, are not original compositions, and they should be read differ-
ently, even if they require the development of a new kind of literacy.
Readers can increase their appreciation of translations by deciding not to read
them as isolated texts. They can rather create their own contexts of interpretation
by joining their experience of a particular translation with other translations from
xviii  Introduction

the same or different source languages as well as with original compositions writ-
ten in the translating language. Such contextual reading can help to make the trans-
lator’s interpretation visible, provided that readers broaden their focus to include
patterns in the selection of source texts while attending to the textual features of the
translation itself, its cultivation of dialects, styles, and discourses that are rooted
in the translating language and culture. A translation requires a double reading
that employs both of the hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur termed “faith” vs. “suspi-
cion,” alternating between the trustful assumption that the translation establishes
a semantic correspondence and stylistic approximation to the source text and the
skeptical assumption that it maintains a relative autonomy from that text which
answers to the receiving situation.
Why, we might wonder, have concepts like “domesticating” and “foreigniz-
ing” been oversimplified in so many accounts of this book? Consider a telling
passage from Matthew Reynolds’s Translation: A Very Short Introduction (2016).
Reynolds, Professor of English and Comparative Criticism at Oxford University,
makes no mention of The Translator’s Invisibility in his list of “References” or in
his recommendations for “Further reading.” But he does include this citation, at
once vague and misleading:

It is sometimes said that translators have a responsibility to give a strong

impression of the linguistic particularity, or “otherness” of the source text.
This view has roots in work by the German philosopher Friedrich Schleier-
macher in the 19th century, and was elaborated by the French literary critic
Antoine Berman in the 1980s; it has since been popularized in the Anglo-
phone world by the translation theorist Lawrence Venuti. But the value of a
“foreignizing” style of translation is always dependent on context. To bring
the word motsoalle into English is to foreignize – and that seems necessary.
But to Leela Sarkar in Kerala or to the dragoman writing to Elizabeth I, it was
more important to produce a text that would not offend their readers. Trans-
lators’ responsibilities pull in different directions, and they feel the pressure
of competing powers.

In referring to “a ‘foreignizing’ style of translation” Reynolds has reduced for-

eignizing translation to a specific verbal choice or discursive strategy: literalism,
meaning close or exact adherence to the source text. Hence his first example is
an English translator’s retention of motsoalle, a word in the South African lan-
guage Sesotho which signifies, he explains, “intense friendships” between women
“which can co-exist happily with marriage even though they involve sexual inti-
macy.” His other examples reinforce this reductiveness. In his view, neither Leela
Sarkar, a prolific translator from Bengali to Malayalam, nor the dragoman, trans-
lating from Turkish into Italian for the English monarch, produced foreignizing
translations because they omitted portions of the source texts, combining trans-
lation with such other second-order practices as adaptation or editing. Reynolds
assumes not only that foreignizing is literalism, but also that translation can give
 Introduction  xix

unmediated access to the “linguistic particularity, or ‘otherness’ of the source

text” through a literalizing strategy.
What prevents Reynolds from seeing that foreignizing translation can construct
only an image of the foreign, never communicating the foreign itself? The obstacle,
apparently, is an instrumentalism whereby translation, at least of the foreignizing kind,
is regarded as capable of reproducing or transferring an invariant contained in or caused
by the source text, whether its form, its meaning or its effect – here the unchanging
essence of its foreignness. Ultimately, Reynolds treats “foreignizing” as one term in a
binary opposition where the other term is “domesticating,” which is implicitly defined
as translation that does not “offend” its readers. Offense is avoided here either by
inserting a complimentary remark – the ­dragoman’s translation expressed deference
toward Elizabeth in place of his sultan’s insulting condescension – or by removing a
depiction of politically motivated violence – Sarkar’s translation deletes a woman’s
aggressive act toward her male oppressor in Mahasweta Devi’s story, “Draupadi.”
(Yet would not motsoalle be likely to “offend” any Anglophone readership that holds
a conception of marriage that is not only monogamous but also heteronormative?) He
thus assimilates concepts like “domesticating” and “foreignizing” to the oppositions
that have dominated translation theory and commentary since antiquity, starting with
“word-for-word” vs. “sense-for-sense” (Cicero, Jerome) and including “formal” vs.
“dynamic” (Eugene Nida), “semantic” vs. “communicative” (Peter Newmark), and
“adequacy” vs. “acceptability” (Gideon Toury). This reductive interpretation, in val-
idating dominant thinking in translation studies, ends up domesticating The Transla-
tor’s Invisibility, suppressing any interrogative impact it may have on the hierarchy of
cultural resources and ideologies in the field.
Be wary of the literature that has accumulated on this book. Read it first, on its
own, before consulting summaries or commentaries. Do not attempt to be impar-
tial; read it with the full awareness that you may be deeply committed to very
different ideas about translation. Be critical: do not take any of its concepts and
arguments at face value. Yet remain open to the questions it raises, however diffi-
cult they may seem to accept. Do not stop after reading the first chapter, but read
through the others, in sequence, paying special attention to how key points change
and new arguments develop as a succession of translators decide on the most
effective interventions into their cultural situations. Judge for yourself whether
the book presents a viable perspective on the theory, history, and practice of trans-
lation. Does it compel an interrogation of the current state of translation studies?
Does it lead you to question the fields and disciplines that depend on translation
in so many ways? In the end, does it change the way you think about translation?

Lawrence Venuti
Syros
September 2017