Venuti - Scandals of translation (1998)

 SCANDALS OF TRANSLATION (1998)

Introdution

• Tradução marginalizada. Provoca o status quo. Provoca o conceito de direito autoral e a economia capitalista imperialista globalizada. Expõe as ideologias em cada tradução.
• Pesquisa limitada a abordagens linguísticas se tornam cientificistas e alheias às questões sócioculturais da trad ao proporem que são "neutras".
• A autoria da tradução é diferente do original, ela serve a comunidade estrangeira e doméstica. Colaboração entre grupos distintos "motivated by an acknoowledgement of the linguistic and cvultural differences that translation necessarily rewrites and reorders" 4.
• Escandalos: assimetria, relações de poder e desigualdades na tradução.
• Sobre autotraduções:
• The fact that the author is the inerpreter doesn't make the interpretation unmediated by target-language values [...] When the author is the tranlator, apparently, he is not above te domestications that he attacked in the previous English versions. 6
• Definir um escândalo pressupõe uma ética de tradução.

Heterogeneity

• Translation studies ainda não eram uma disciplina. Ele classifica como um interdisciplina depentente do contexto institucional. É dominada pela abordagem linguistica cientificisita e pela abordagem astética sócio-cultural fruto de uma falta de coesão disciplinar 8.
• Teorias de tradução
• My main interest in the theories lies in their impact on the methodological fragmentation that characterizes translation research and keeps translation in the margins of cultural discourse, both in and out of the academy. The question that most concerns me is whether theorists are capable of bringing translation to the attention of a larger audience — larger, that is, than the relatively limited ones to which the competing theories seem addressed. 9
• Domesticação pode ser mais popular, porém mascarar a intereção do leitor com o estrangeiro como se não houvesse um processo de "ideologização" do texto para a língua-alvo.
• Fala de minoritizing translation, como forma de estrangeirizar sem estranahr:
• The heterogeneous discourse of minoritizing translation resists this assimi- lationist ethic by signifying the linguistic and cultural differences of the text — within the major language. The heterogeneity needn’t be so alienating as to frustrate a popular approach completely; if the remainder is released at significant points in a translation that is generally readable, the reader’s partici- pation will be disrupted only momentarily. Moreover, a strategic use of minority elements can remain intelligible to a wide range of readers and so increase the possibility that the translation will cross the boundaries between cultural constituencies, even if it comes to signify different meanings in different groups. A minoritizing translator can draw on the conventionalized language of popular culture, “the patter of comedians, of radio announcers, of disc jockeys” (Lecercle 1988: 37), to render a foreign text that might be regarded as elite literature in a seamlessly fluent translation. This strategy would address both popular and elite readerships by defamiliarizing the domestic mass media as well as the domestic canon for the foreign literature. Minoritizing translation can thus be considered an intervention into the contemporary public sphere, in which electronic forms of communication driven by economic interest have fragmented cultural consumption and debate. If “the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use non-publicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical” (Habermas 1989: 175), then translating should seek to invent a minor language that cuts across cultural divisions and hierarchies. The goal is ultimately to alter reading patterns, compelling a not unpleasurable recognition of translation among constituencies who, while possessing different cultural values, nonetheless share a long-standing unwillingness to recognize it. 12-3
• Fala do Tarchetti aqui também.
• Transparência: há uma preferênia pelo vocabulário mais comum, portanto mais invísivel, para não quebrar a ilusão de transparÊncia. 20
• Critica a abordagem linguistica por não explicarem muita coisa e serem normativos, apresentando um modelo conservador da linguagem. 21
• Rodapé
• adding footnotes to the translation can narrow the domestic audience to a cultural elite since foot- notes are an academic convention. 22
• Teoria de comunicação cooperativa da tradução de Grice: 4 máximas: quantidade de informação, qualidade ou veracidade; relevÂncia ou consistência de contexto e modo ou clareza. 21 Venuti discorda.
• Tradução técnica:
• Pragmatic or technical translation would seem to be better suited to theorization according to Grice’s maxims. In fact, translators of scientific, commercial, legal, and diplomatic documents will be bound, by their contracts or by the conditions of their employment in agencies, to honor those maxims because the texts they translate give priority to communication in institutional terms. The translation of technical documents (e.g. scientific research, product warranties, birth certificates, peace treaties) usually occurs in such narrowly defined situations, with specialized readerships and standardized terminologies devised precisely to escape the continual variation in natural languages. Any implicature in these documents tends to be purely conventional, hardly brought into existence by the flouting that occurs in conversation. The ethics I formulated for translating literary texts, then, must be revised to accommodate the different conditions of technical translation: here good translating adheres to the conventions of the field or discipline or the practical purpose that the document is designed to serve. This is a purely functional standard, which will eventually force the evaluation of the translated text to take into account its social effects, possibly the economic and political interests it serves (e.g. Does the translator wish to translate — an instruction manual, an advertisement, a labor contract — for a transnational corporation that engages in questionable labor practices?). 23-4
• Contudo em vários casos os tradutores podem violar as máximas a depender do contexto e do que estão traduzindo.
• Modelo cientifico: Aboragem linguistica ve a linguagem como um conjunto de regras indepentes da cultura.
• Louva as ideias de Toury, mas também as critica por serem cientificistas. Especialmente a ideia de suspensão de valores e proposição de padrões regulares. Aboragens empíricas (linguística ou polissistêmicas) devem ser acompanhadas de análises sociais e históricas. 28-30

Authority

• Perhaps the most important factor in the current marginality of translation is its offense against the prevailing concept of authorship. Whereas authorship is generally defined as originality, self-expression in a unique text, translation is derivative, neither self-expression nor unique: it imitates another text. Given the reigning concept of authorship, translation provokes the fear of inauthenticity, distortion, contamination. Yet insofar as the translator must focus on the linguistic and cultural constituents of the foreign text, translation may also provoke the fear that the foreign author is not original, but derivative, fundamentally dependent on pre-existing materials. It is partly to quell these fears that translation practices in English cultures (among many others) have routinely aimed for their own concealment, at least since the seventeenth century, since John Dryden (Venuti 1995a; Berman 1985). In practice the fact of translation is erased by suppressing the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, assimilating it to dominant values in the target-language culture, making it recognizable and therefore seemingly untranslated. With this domestication the translated text passes for the original, an expression of the foreign author’s intention. 31
• Também ofende os estudos que se baseiam em autoria original. Há um endeusamento da língua estrangeira.
• Behind this seemingly common-sense view, however, lies a greater scandal, a veneration of foreign languages and literatures that is irrational in its extremity since it is unlikely to find any translation acceptable. Yes, trans- lation errors should be corrected, but errors do not diminish a translation’s readability, its power to communicate and to give pleasure. Foreign-language academics fear translation because it appears to threaten fairly rote foreign- language study (which is all that is needed to detect translation errors). In more paranoid cases, with shrinking enrollments, the fear may be that trans- lation might decrease and ultimately stop such study. And yet without instruction in foreign languages translators aren’t formed, and translation can’t occur or be studied. 32 
• When texts from the academic canon of foreign literatures are translated by non-specialists, foreign-language academics close ranks and assume a don’t-tread-on-my-patch attitude. They correct errors and imprecisions in conformity with scholarly standards and interpretations, excluding other possible readings of the foreign text and other possible audiences: for example, belletristic translations that may slight accuracy for literary effect so as to reach a general readership with different values. 33
• Translation, with its double allegiance to the foreign text and the domestic culture, is a reminder that no act of interpretation can be definitive for every cultural constituency, that interpretation is always local and contingent, even when housed in social institutions with the apparent rigidity of the academy. In such settings, translation is scandalous because it crosses institutional boundaries: not only does translation require scholarly research to move between languages, cultures, and disciplines, but it compels the scholar to consider constituencies beyond the academy — for example, the overwhelming majority of English-language readers who need translations because foreign-language study has declined as English has achieved global dominance. At the present time, translation studies comprise an area of research that uncomfortably exposes the limitations of English-language scholarship — and of English.46

Copyright 

• A lei favorece os editores e os autores.
• Copyright protege o conceito de autoria ideal transcendental imediada, relegando a trad. a condição de dependência. 50-1
• Identificação do tradutor como autr:
• The Latin axiom was drawn from the Aristotelian metaphysics that prevailed in medieval scholastic philosophy: in a fairly close rendering, “form brings things into existence.” The counsel apparently cited this metaphysical principle to establish the relative autonomy of the translation from the foreign text: translating is seen as form-creating, and therefore the translation can be said to exist as an object independent of the underlying work on which it is based. Yet the axiom also suggests that the translation effectively creates the foreign text in another language, that the different form created by the translator brings into existence another text with a different meaning. If forma dat esse rei, form cannot easily be detached from content, nor can formal changes preserve the same content unchanged. Hence, the translator’s new “style and expressions” must produce a new “sense.” 59 
• Nonetheless, the closeness of the relation between translation and foreign text should not be taken as implying that the two works are identical, or that the translation is not an independent work of authorship. If authorship is collective, if a work both collaborates with and derives from a cultural context, then the translation and the foreign text are distinct projects because they involve different intentions and contexts. The significance of a foreign novel in the foreign literature where it was produced will never be exactly the same as the significance of that novel in a translation designed for circulation in another language and literature. This goes some way toward explaining why bestsellers don’t always repeat their success in a foreign country when translated.
• Autoria deve ser vista como colaborativa, não individualistica. O autor responde ao contexto em que produz. 60
• Copyright law has failed to acknowledge the manifold relations that deter- mine any translation because it has been dominated by individualistic concepts of authorship, whether Lockean or Romantic, whether grounded in labor or in personality. These concepts have diminished the legal status of derivative forms, while concealing the degree to which the underlying work is itself derivative. A collective concept of authorship offers a precise definition of form to distinguish between a translation and the foreign text it translates: the collaborative and derivative dimensions of form result in linguistic and cultural differences that can serve as the basis for the translator’s claim to copyright, but also for an argument in favor of restricting the foreign author’s right in the translation. 62 

The formation of cultural identities

• Maior escandalo. O poder de construção da representação de outras cutluras.
• The selection of foreign texts and the development of translation strategies can establish peculiarly domestic canons for foreign literatures, canons that conform to domestic aesthetic values and therefore reveal exclusions and admissions, centers and peripheries that deviate from those current in the foreign language. Foreign literatures tend to be dehistoricized by the selection of texts for translation, removed from the foreign literary traditions where they draw their significance. And foreign texts are often rewritten to conform to styles and themes that currently prevail in domestic literatures, much to the disadvantage of more historicizing translation discourses that recover styles and themes from earlier moments in domestic traditions. 
• Translation patterns that come to be fairly established fix stereotypes for foreign cultures, excluding values, debates, and conflicts that don’t appear to serve domestic agendas. In creating stereotypes, translation may attach esteem or stigma to specific ethnic, racial, and national groupings, signifying respect for cultural difference or hatred based on ethnocentrism, racism, or patriotism. In the long run, translation figures in geopolitical relations by establishing the cultural grounds of diplomacy, reinforcing alliances, antagonisms, and hegemonies between nations. 
• Yet since translations are usually designed for specific cultural constituencies, they set going a process of identity formation that is double-edged. As translation constructs a domestic representation for a foreign text and culture, it simultaneously constructs a domestic subject, a position of intelligibility that is also an ideological position, informed by the codes and canons, interests and agendas of certain domestic social groups. Circulating in the church, the state, and the school, a translation can be powerful in maintaining or revising the hierarchy of values in the translating language. A calculated choice of foreign text and translation strategy can change or consolidate literary canons, conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, clinical techniques, and commercial practices in the domestic culture. Whether the effects of a translation prove to be conservative or transgressive depends fundamentally on the discursive strategies developed by the translator, but also on the various factors in their reception, including the page design and cover art of the printed book, the advertising copy, the opinions of reviewers, and the uses made of the translation in cultural and social institutions, how it is read and taught. Such factors mediate the impact of any translation by assisting in the positioning of domestic subjects, equipping them with specific reading practices, affiliating them with specific cultural values and constituencies, reinforcing or crossing institutional limits. 67-8 
• Estudo de Joneas sobre as traduções individualistas de aristóteles. "The case of Jones shows that, despite strict canons of accuracy, even academic translations construct distinctly domestic representations of foreign texts and cultures.  70"
• Berman já denunciava que traduções ruins eram aquelas que negavam o estrangeiro. 81
• Sobre a ética da tradução:
• A translation ethics, clearly, can’t be restricted to a notion of fidelity. Not only does a translation constitute an interpretation of the foreign text, varying  with different cultural situations at different historical moments, but canons of accuracy are articulated and applied in the domestic culture and there- fore are basically ethnocentric, no matter how seemingly faithful, no matter how linguistically correct. The ethical values implicit in such canons are generally professional or institutional, established by agencies and officials, academic specialists, publishers, and reviewers and subsequently assimilated by translators, who adopt varying attitudes towards them, from acceptance to ambivalance to interrogation and revision. Any evaluation of a translation project must include a consideration of discursive strategies, their institutional settings, and their social functions and effects. 81-2
• É possível seguir uma ética da diferença que visa atenuar os efeitos domesticatórios da tradução. É um jeito de ficar no meio entre as dua socisas.
• [Critica a nord] 83

The Pedagogy of Literature

• Assimetria no volume de traduções assegura a dominção dos mercados americano e britânico sobre os outros.
• Há uma ocultação da tradução no ambiente acadêmico e escolar 89. Ver o caso de Dante sobre o uso de traduções em aulas 91-2
• A pedagogia da trad:
• A pedagogy of translated literature can help students learn to be both selfcritical and critical of exclusionary cultural ideologies by drawing attention to the situatedness of texts and interpretations. Translations are always intelligible to, if not intentionally made for, specific cultural constituencies at specific historical moments. The repression of translation makes ideas and forms appear to be free-floating, unmoored from history, transcending the linguistic and cultural differences that required not merely their translation in the first place, but also their interpretation in a classroom. The effort to reconstruct the period in which the foreign text was produced, to create a historical context for interpretation, does not so much compensate for the loss of historicity as complicate and exacerbate it: students are encouraged to regard their historical interpretations as immanent in the texts, not determined by translation discourses and critical methodologies that answer to the cultural values of different, later moments. As a result, students develop a concept of interpretive truth as a simple adequacy to the text, ignoring the fact that they are actively constituting it by selecting and synthesizing textual evidence and historical research, and that therefore their interpretation is shaped by linguistic and cultural constraints — which include their reliance on a translation. Recognizing a text as translated and figuring this recognition into classroom interpretations can teach students that their critical operations are limited and provisional, situated in a changing history of reception, in a specific cultural situation, in a curriculum, in a particular language. And with the knowledge of limitations comes the awareness of possibilities, different ways of understanding the foreign text, different ways of understanding their own cultural moments. 93 
• Acredita que o tradutor deve ser ensinado junto com o autor (claro que em um contexto literário); "When students see that translation is not simple communication, but an appropriation of the foreign text to serve domestic purposes, they can come to question the appropriative movements in their own encounters with foreign cultures.  95"

Philosophy

• In philosophical research widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation. The problem is perhaps most glaring in Anglo-American cultures, where native philosophical traditions from empiricism to logical semantics have privileged language as communication and therefore imagined the transparency of the translated text. 106
• Recepção de Witgenstein que teve seu livro publicado de maneiras bilingue. O ingles era citado como se fosse dele, não deram atenção para a tradução.
• Prestar atenção na tradução permite uma auto-análise histórica da filosofia escancarando as tendências domésticas da época. 110
• Reading for the remainder in a translation forces a self-awareness upon the interpreter, the knowledge that textual effects can be made intelligible and significant only from a specific theoretical orientation. Wittgenstein himself had this knowledge, even if he didn’t apply it explicitly to translation: “The paradox disappears,” he wrote, “only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts — which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please” (Wittgenstein 1953: 102). The same self-awareness is absent from the dominant reading of Anscombe’s text, where the idealism of transparent translation is assumed, and the colloquial expression is interpreted in deference to Wittgenstein’s philosophy (or at least to the part of it that supports a particular commentary). Thus, an interpreter who noticed the peculiarity of Anscombe’s choice — “If language goes on holiday during philosophical rumination, it is a working holiday” — nonetheless found it consistent with Wittgenstein’s ideas: “the philosopher’s conception of meaning accounts for his cavalier attitude toward context” (Hallett 1971: 101). 
• Which is to say that the remainder is unpredictable. The metacommentary it sets going in a philosophical translation will take different forms in different contexts, depending as much on the specific ideas under discussion as on the interpreter’s assumptions. 112-3
• Estretégias de trad filosofica
• To be useful in translating foreign philosophies, the remainder requires a reformulation of the notion of accuracy, a broadening that takes into account both the foreign text and domestic readers. It would be more precise to reserve the term “accuracy” for lexicographical equivalence and rather refer to the translator’s ethical responsibilities. Since translating can communicate only by reconstituting the foreign text, a translator can choose to judge a translation good when it signifies the linguistic and cultural difference of that text for domestic constituencies. The ethical value of this difference resides in alerting the reader that a process of domestication has taken place in the translating, but also in preventing that process from slipping into an unreflective assimilation to dominant domestic values. Foreign philosophies can retain their difference in translation when they differ to some extent from those that currently dominate the discipline at home, or when they are translated so as to differ from prevailing domestic interpretations of their concepts and discourses. The best philosophical translating is itself philosophical in forming a concept of the foreign text based on an assessment of the domestic scene. But if the philosophy of the translating values difference, the concept will be defamiliarizing, not based on a ratification of that scene. 115 
• O trad deve estabelecer um léxico equivalente e manter a estrangeiridade para leitores domésticos.
• Translating motivated by an ethics of difference seeks to inform domestic readers of foreign philosophies, but also to provoke them into new thinking. It acknowledges that foreign concepts and discourses can change domestic institutions by forcing a self-criticism and by stimulating the invention of new philosophies, new philosophical canons and curricula, new qualifications for academic philosophers. 115
• For the translator, a more literary approach turns the philosophical translation into a minor literature within the literature of philosophy. The experimental translation is minoritizing: it creates a philosophical language that challenges the domestic hierarchy of philosophical languages. The translation that in contrast avoids stylistic innovation will have an insinuating impact on the domestic discipline, assimilating the foreign text to the standard dialect, the dominant philosophies, the prevailing interpretations. Only the experimental translation can signify the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text by deterritorializing the major language and opening the institution to new concepts and discourses. By taking account of translation, philosophy doesn’t come to an end, doesn’t become poetry or history, but rather expands to embrace other kinds of thinking and writing. 123 
• É possível assumir uma ética de igualdade, que visa a domesticação de conceitos estrangeiros. Ela apaga certos aspectos do texto e os substitui por crtitérios domésticos voluveis.
• [Compara e discute diversas trads de platão e mais alguns]

The bestsellers

• Controle editorial. Há poucas traduções porque elas são mais arriscadas e caras.
• [Longa análise da recepção de um best seller italiano de Guareschi nos EUA durante a guerra fria]
• Intervenções editoriais são importantes na recepção da tradução:
• The key factor in Guareschi’s success was the production of the translations, a complicated process that comprehended various editorial moves and is documented to some extent in the publishers’ archive.” The Italian texts were deliberately edited and translated so as to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries, not just between Italy and the United States, but between different English-language constituencies, British as well as American. 140
• Throughout the roughly two decades that Guareschi remained the bestselling Italian writer in English, the production process was unwavering in its adherence to the popular aesthetic. None of the editors and translators involved ever regarded the Italian texts as literature in a modern sense, as the unique work of an authorial intention. Hence, they translated with latitude, according to their own sense of accuracy. They were most interested in the functions of the text — informative, didactic, commercial — and therefore focussed on the effects of the translation, developing a fluent discourse that was readily assimilable to prevailing domestic values and eminently marketable. And all of Guareschi’s editors and translators were aware that they were shaping the Italian texts for mass consumption. 149 
• Exclusão trabalhista dos tradutores. 151
• Experimentalismo pós modernista e diminuição da barreira elitista permitiram a entrada de títulos mais aliens na cultura americana. Contudo ainda permanceu a tradição domesticatória da tradução 153-4
• The success of a highbrow novel in translation, then, should not be taken as a new sophistication in American literary taste or reading practices, one that indicates a greater openness to cultural difference or an increased awareness of contemporary foreign literatures. On the contrary, the foreign text becomes a translated bestseller because it is not so foreign as to upset the domestic status quo: the production process, from editing and translating to promotion and marketing, shapes the text for mass consumption by addressing dominant values in the domestic culture. The globalization of American popular culture has helped this process by enabling American publishers to pick foreign texts that reveal American cultural infiltrations. The popular aesthetic continues to be a key factor in producing a translated bestseller today, but it cannot be applied to such an extent that elite modes of appreciation are preempted. The translated bestseller must now be all things to many readers by permitting them to make what domestic use they will of it. 155-6

Globalization

• Trad revela a assimetria global. Forçada pela colonização e pela desconolização (ainda mais no neocolonialismo neoliberal). Chama atenção para a hegemonia cultural.
• [Fala sobre os dados da unesco: "incomplete because countries fail to report data and inconsistent because they follow different definitions of what constitutes a book, can still be useful for indicating broad trends.  160" e mais]
• China não tinha copyright até os anos 1980 162
• Necessidade de validação da métropole. 164-5
• Tradução como comercialismo e como formação de identidade 186-7
• Thus, the cultural authority and impact of translation vary according to the position of a particular country in the geopolitical economy. In the hegemonic countries, metaphysical concepts of authorial originality and cultural authenticity denigrate translation as second-order writing, derivative and adulterated, so that especially in the United States and the United Kingdom it receives relatively little attention from writers and critics, scholars and teachers. In developing countries, translation accrues cultural as well as economic capital. The need to communicate between major and minor languages has spawned translation industries and training programs. Translation is seen as a significant intervention into the polylingualism and cultural hybridity that characterize colonial and postcolonial situations, a source of linguistic innovation useful in building national literatures and in resisting the dominance of hegemonic languages and cultures. 
• These diverse effects and functions bring a new complexity to a translation ethics that takes as its ideal the recognition of cultural difference. If domesticating strategies of choosing and translating foreign texts are considered ethically questionable — a narcissistic dismissal of foreignness in favor of dominant domestic values — minority situations redefine what constitutes the “domestic” and the “foreign.” These two categories are variable, always reconstructed in a translation project vis-a-vis the local scene. 187 
• For a translation ethics grounded in such differences, the key issue is not simply a discursive strategy (fluent or resistant), but always its intention and effect as well — i.e., whether the translating realizes an aim to promote cultural innovation and change. It can best signal the foreignness of the foreign text by revising the hierarchy of cultural discourses that pre-exist that text in the target language, by crossing the boundaries between domestic cultural constituencies, and by altering the reproduction of institutional values and practices. A translation ethics of sameness that hews to dominant domestic values and consolidates institutions limits these effects, usually to avoid any loss of cultural authority and to accumulate capital. 188 
• Colonialismo complica esse processo. Tradução fluente de títulos anglofonos reforça a hegemonia.
• Because developing countries are notable sites of contest between cultural sameness and difference, they can teach their hegemonic others an important lesson about the functionality of translation. The value of any translated text depends on effects and functions that can’t be entirely predicted or controlled. Yet this element of contingency increases rather than lessens the translator’s responsibility to estimate the impact of a project by reconstructing the hierarchy of domestic values that inform the translation and its likely reception. Colonial and postcolonial situations show that translating is best done with 4 critical resourcefulness attuned to the linguistic and cultural differences that comprise the local scene. Only these differences offer the means of registering the foreignness of foreign cultures in translation. 189.