Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

The Cultural Turn: Venuti (2000)

In this reader, Venuti assembles a number of articles and essays by different contributors and which represent the most important contributions to translation studies in the 20^th century. Among the reasons advanced for the publication of this reader, one can mention:

x the rapid growth of the translation discipline as can be seen in the multitude of translation training centres and publications .

x the diversity of translation research, with some scholars dealing with the didactics of translation, but most focusing on translation within and across traditional disciplines such as linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy and anthropology.
The reader is divided into five chronological sections:

x 1900s-1930s x 1940s-1950s x 1960s-1970s

x 1980s
x 1990s
Each section provides a brief account of the main approaches and includes seminal articles by prominent translation scholars. However, Venuti warns that the multitude of translation theories makes it difficult to give a comprehensive evaluation of the translation situation today:
In translation studies, the broad spectrum of theories and research methodologies may doom any assessment of its “current state” to partial representation, superficial synthesis, optimistic canonization. (Venuti 2000: 1)
A. 1900s-1930s
According to Venuti, translation theory in this period is influenced by German literary and philosophical traditions, hermeneutics and essential phenomenology. Language is considered “not so much communicative as constitutive in its representation of thought and reality” (Venuti 2000: 11). Consequently, translation is viewed simply as an “interpretation which necessarily reconstitutes and transforms the foreign text” (Ibid).
The autonomous status of translation is also recognized: a translated text is considered in its own right as an independent “work of signification” despite its being derived from an original text. The main

authors cited by Venuti in this period and who adopt this view are Walter Benjamin (1923) and Ezra Pound. For the first,

A translation participates in the afterlife (Überleben) of the foreign text, enacting an interpretation that is informed by a history of reception (“the age of its fame”). This interpretation does more than transmit essays; it recreates the values that accrued to the foreign text over time. (Venuti 2000: 11)
As for Ezra Pound,
The autonomy of translation takes two forms. A translated text might be “interpretive”, a critical “accompaniment”, usually printed next to the foreign poem and composed of linguistic peculiarities that direct the reader across the page to foreign textual features, like a lexical choice or a prosodic effect. Or a translation might be “original writing”, in which literary “standards” in the translating culture guide the rewriting of the foreign poem so decisively as to seem a “new poem” in that language. The relation between the two texts doesn’t disappear; it is just masked by an illusion of originality, although in target language terms. (Ibid)
B. 1940s-1950s
According to Venuti, the dominating concept in this period is TRANSLATABILITY which he examines through the works of E. Nida (1945) and Roman Jakobson (1959). He also refers to the work of Vinay and Darbelnet which he considers of “enormous practical and pedagogical value” (See Venuti’s introduction to Translation in 1940s-1950s (2000: 67-70)).
With regard to Nida, Venuti states that during his translation of the Bible, Nida faced the problem of translating between “different realities” and hence the proposal that to solve such problems, the translator has to have the necessary cultural information. In other words, the translator has to seek ethnological solutions (Nida 1945: 197). Translation, here, as a consequence, becomes a kind of paraphrase:
It works to reduce linguistic and cultural differences to a shared referent. Yet, the referent is clearly a core of meaning constructed by the translator and weighted towards the receiving culture so as to be comprehensible there. (Venuti 2000: 69)
Regarding R. Jakobson’s views on translation, Venuti argues that the main contribution in this period lies in his introducing “a semiotic reflection on the subject of translatability”. Thus, for Jakobson, “All cognitive experience and its classification are conveyable in any existing language” (Jakobson 1959: 56). This can be done by using loan-words,

loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts and circumlocution (Ibid). By adopting such a stance, Jakobson is rejecting the claims of untranslatability voiced by some linguists such as Whorf, who maintains that

facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulations of them. (Whorf 1956: 235)
Jakobson also rejects Bertrand Russell’s statement that “no one can understand the word cheese unless he has a non-linguistic acquaintance with cheese”. Instead, Jakobson argues, “no one can understand the word cheese unless he has an acquaintance with the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical code: food made of pressed curds” (Jakobson 1959: 54). In other words, the meaning of the word cheese is to be understood in its relation with other words in the verbal code. The meaning of this word according to Jakobson, then, is:
definitely a linguistic- or to be more precise and less narrow -a semiotic fact. (Ibid: 54)
Only poetry, according to Jakobson, is untranslatable because the components that make up poetry, namely, syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes… “carry their own autonomous significance according to the principles of similarity and contrast when these components are confronted or juxtaposed” (Ibid: 59).
To round off this discussion on Jakobson’s reflections on translatability, it is important to draw attention to his crucial distinction between different types of translation:

1. 
   intralingual translation or rewording
   
2. 
   interlingual translation or translation proper
   
3. 
   intersemiotic translation. (Ibid : 55)
   

Concerning Vinay & Darbelnet, Venuti maintains that the work of these two Canadian linguists constitutes a major contribution to translation studies in this period because it “provides a theoretical basis for a variety of translation methods currently in use” (Venuti 2000: 70). In their book, Vinay & Darbelnet identify two general translation strategies: direct translation and oblique translation, which in turn are sub-divided into seven procedures:
1/ borrowing, 2/ calque, 3/ literal translation, 4/ transposition, 5/ modulation, 6/ equivalence, 7/ adaptation.

C. 1960s-1970s

This period, according to Venuti, is marked by the predominance of the concept of equivalence which he defines in the following terms:
Translating is generally seen as a process of communicating the foreign text by establishing a relationship of identity or analogy with it. (Ibid: 121)
Many typologies of equivalence were proposed towards the end of the 1970s. In a very important paper, Koller (1979b) enumerates these typologies as follows:
x denotative equivalence
x connotative equivalence
x text-normative equivalence
x pragmatic equivalence
x formal equivalence
However, the most important theoretical evolution concerning the concept of equivalence, Venuti suggests, lies in the rise of a distinction between translating that cultivates pragmatic equivalence, immediately intelligible to the receptor, and translating that is formally equivalent, designed to approximate the linguistic and cultural features of the foreign text. (Venuti 2000: 121)
He further clarifies the distinction by stating that
pragmatic equivalence communicates the foreign text according to values so familiar in the receiving language and culture as to conceal the very fact of translating. Formal equivalence, in contrast, adheres so closely to the linguistic and cultural values of the foreign text as to reveal the translation to be a translation. (Ibid: 122)
Instead of the term “pragmatic”, Venuti points out that Nida (1964) uses the term “dynamic”, which is subsequently replaced by the term “functional” in Nida and Taber (1969). He also mentions the appearance of variants to the dichotomoy “dynamic vs. formal”, such as Newmark’s “communicative vs. semantic” translation and Julian House’s “covert vs. overt” translation.
D. 1980s:
According to Venuti, this period is marked by the birth of Vermeer’s work on Skopos. This is a Greek word which signifies “purpose” or “aim”. In translation theory, the term refers to the purpose of a translation. It was first used by Hans J. Vermeer in the 1970s and later in 1984 this concept

was developed into a theory which appeared in the co-authored book of Vermeer and Reiss, Groundwork for a General Theory of Translation.

According to Skopos theory, the translation methods and strategies are determined by the purpose of the translation. The translator has to be clear about why he is translating a ST and what the function of the TT will be. Following from this approach to translation, the ST can be translated differently depending on the purpose of the TT and the commission given to the translator.
Skopos theory, however, did not escape criticism. Some of the criticisms levelled at it include: excluding literary texts from its investigation and not giving sufficient consideration to the linguistic make-up of the ST.
E. 1990s
According to Venuti, this is a decade where translation studies achieved the greatest success as a new discipline because of
the worldwide proliferation of translator training and the flood of scholarly publishing… training manuals, encyclopedias, journals, conference proceedings, collection of research articles, monographs, primers of theory, and readers that gather a variety of theoretical statements. (Venuti 2000: 333)
However, the single most important characteristic of this period, for Venuti, is the emergence of works seeking to link translated texts and translation processes to teaching cultural and political issues such as the works of Hatim & Mason (1990) and (1997):
Hatim and Mason perform nuanced analyses of actual translation in terms of style, genre, discourse, pragmatics and ideology. Their unit of analysis is the whole text, and their analytical method takes into account the differences between “literary” and “non-literary” translation. (Ibid: 335)

3.