Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This "instrumental" model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés.
Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life.
Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This "instrumental" model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés.
Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life.
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Overview
Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This "instrumental" model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés.
Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496205131 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2019 |
| Series: | Provocations |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Lawrence Venuti, a professor of English at Temple University, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a literary translator. He is the author, editor, or translator of twenty-five books, including The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation; Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice; and The Translation Studies Reader.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Hijacking Translation
Uneven Developments
Academia is slow to change. The snag, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, is resistance to new ideas which favors those that currently enjoy authority in a particular field. Academics harbor an anti-intellectualism, ironically, bred by the splintering of intellectual labor into so many institutional compartments. To specialize, however productive the yield in quantity and depth of knowledge, is to clap on a set of blinders.
Take the field of comparative literature. It originated in late nineteenth-century Europe, and from the 1950s onward it was firmly established in the United States, invigorated by the contributions of European émigré scholars and housed in departments and programs at many academic institutions. By 1975 a total of 150 schools offered degrees or concentrations on both the undergraduate and graduate levels; currently that figure stands at 187. Despite this remarkable growth, comparatists took more than a century to recognize that the field was grounded on fundamentally Eurocentric and nationalist assumptions.
During this period, the notion of comparing literatures amounted in most cases to a methodology that contained three critical moves. Resemblances were located among forms and themes from a canon of European works read in their original languages; differences were made intelligible in terms of the national languages, traditions, and cultures in which those works were rooted; more sweeping generalizations, whether transnational or universal, might ultimately be ventured, depending on the comparatist's assumptions about literature, society, or humanity. Erich Auerbach's magisterial Mimesis (1946), a locus classicus for this methodology, surveys "the literary representation of reality in European culture" from antiquity to the twentieth century, explicitly excluding the "consideration" of "foreign influences" ("fremde Einwirkungen") as "not necessary" (where "foreign" means transnational as well as non-European). Comparatists were expected to master a minimum of four European languages, including English, regardless of the fact that they increasingly came to rely on translations in their research and teaching. Not until the early 1990s, when the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) commissioned Charles Bernheimer to submit a committee-drafted "Report on Standards," did the field publicly confront its long exclusion of non-European cultures as well as the stigma it had attached to translation. The 1993 Bernheimer report, which was published with sixteen "responses" and "position papers," aimed to bring comparative literature in line with what were then perceived as "progressive tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum," encompassing developments in literary and cultural theory, cultural studies, and film studies and treating elite literature as one among an array of cultural forms and practices.
Yet, despite the controversy provoked by the Bernheimer report, not much changed. Postcolonial theory emerged, decades after the militant anticolonial movements, amid an already expanded canon that included African, Asian, and Latin American literatures. By the 1990s this expansion had been institutionalized in myriad courses, publications, conferences, and professorships. Nonetheless, canons are by definition exclusionary because they necessarily create margins where literatures, authors, and works lie in the shadows of neglect. Even European literatures can be overlooked by all but the most narrowly focused specialists (consider Catalan, Hungarian, or modern Greek). And although the Bernheimer report recommends that "the old hostilities toward translation should be mitigated," the responses and position papers that accompanied it were divided on the issue, and translation studies continued to be peripheral in the United States. Translation gained legitimacy in the British Comparative Literature Association during the 1980s, and in the following decade British universities witnessed a mushrooming of degree programs that trained translators and specialized in translation research. U.S. comparatists, in contrast, concentrated unwaveringly on original compositions by canonical writers. With rare exceptions, a scholar's decision to translate or to study translations was likely to jeopardize an academic career.
As the Bernheimer report made clear, comparatists still looked askance at translation because of their investment in "the necessity and unique benefits of a deep knowledge of foreign languages" — even though translation can't be expertly studied or practiced without such an investment. At the start of the new millennium, however, the continuing marginality of translation also seemed to result from an uncertainty as to what it is and does. Haun Saussy's subsequent report for the ACLA, a collection of nineteen essays that assess "The State of the Discipline, 2004," includes an unprecedented essay on the valuable contribution that translation might make to the study of comparative literature. But Saussy's own essay expresses a certain disdain for translation by implicating it in "thematic reading": "What comes across in thematic reading (a tactic devised in response to conditions of our encounter with translated literature) is not necessarily what is most worth knowing about a work." The misguided reader is able to concentrate on theme, Saussy believes, because in translation "nothing of the work may survive the process but the subject matter."
On this point Saussy agrees with Auerbach. Although Auerbach's ideal audience would seem to command eight languages at various stages of historical development (namely, Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English), for his less knowledgeable readers he provides German translations of the passages he discusses. He assumes that the translations transmit the content necessary to make his readings intelligible. In effect, he treats that content as a semantic invariant on the basis of an instrumental model of translation.
Yet this assumption seems oddly credulous for comparatists with the range of languages known by Auerbach and Saussy (who was trained as both a classicist and a Sinologist). Translation can maintain a semantic correspondence, but surely this relation to the source text shouldn't be confused with giving back its theme unaltered. Translation detaches the source text from the diverse contexts that make it uniquely meaningful, valuable, and functional in the language and culture where it originated. Simultaneously, even while maintaining a semantic correspondence, translation builds a different set of contexts in the translating language, supportive of meanings, values, and functions that are new to both the source text and the receiving culture. Hence Saussy can assert that "a translator always perturbs the settled economy of two linguistic systems." But then why does he also think that "a translation always brings across most successfully aspects of a work for which its audience is already prepared"? Can an audience thus prepared also tolerate a translation that perturbs its language? How can a translation at once frustrate and satisfy reader expectations, particularly if it merely transmits source-text content intact? Saussy doesn't explain.
The uncertainty reflected in his essay, given its appearance in a report on the state of the field, may well be representative of comparative literature in the United States. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that over the past decade some departments and programs have created curricular space for translation. Or that they comprise a small minority. A trawl through college and university websites indicates that approximately 25 percent of the schools currently offering comparative literature in some form include translation theory, history, and practice in their course inventories; a few have even instituted certificates. But the figure seems appallingly low for a field that could not exist without the extensive use of translations. And the situation seems not to have changed much since 2005, when a report on the undergraduate curriculum in comparative literature showed that 76.2 percent of the forty schools responding required courses on world literature in translation, but only 14.3 percent required courses in the theory and practice of translation. The courses in translation, moreover, are staffed by faculty who had already nurtured an interest in translation or who were willing to retool in a new area. Not until 2011 did a department of comparative literature (at the University of Oregon) conduct a search for a tenure-track assistant professor with a specialty in translation studies. The search has so far proven to be an isolated instance.
The 2017 ACLA report presents an opportunity to gauge the extent to which translation has now entered the field. On this go-round, instead of a document produced by a committee and made the object of relatively brief responses, a "State of the Discipline" website was created to post submissions of varying lengths vetted by an editorial board, and a selection of these postings subsequently saw print in a volume edited by Ursula Heise. In the end, "over fifty texts" and "sixty participants" were involved, writing under such rubrics as "paradigms," "ideas of the decade," and "futures," and so Heise felt justified in concluding that "a rough map of our discipline's current conceptual topography emerges." In this topography, translation would seem to occupy a miniscule yet still embattled space. A search on the website using the keyword "translation" yields only five postings, not all of which focus on translation. Obviously, it is not regarded as a burning issue in the field. The selection of postings gathered in the printed volume confirms that opinion remains divided as to whether texts produced by interlingual translation can serve as the basis for research and teaching, so that what Bernheimer called "the old hostilities" persist without a doubt: Saussy's chapter in the 2017 report is not alone in complaining that literature "taught predominantly in translation" leads to "lightening up the language requirements and the corresponding cultural information."
When, one wonders, will comparatists realize that no necessary connection exists between teaching in translation and setting foreign language requirements? When will they admit that their research and teaching unavoidably depend on translations? And when will they therefore stop whining about an ineradicable state of affairs and instead apply their energy and expertise to learning how to read translations as texts in their own right? When, in other words, will comparatists acknowledge that translations can contribute to the understanding of the source texts they translate for the very reason that they interpret rather than reproduce those texts?
Meanwhile the three chapters in the 2017 report devoted primarily to translation don't offer much evidence of progress. On the contrary, they indicate various forms of stagnation or derailment in institutionalizing translation studies. Brigitte Rath argues that "pseudotranslation," a term applied to an original composition that is presented as a translation of a nonexistent source text, should be adopted "as a mode of reading," since it "sharpens some central concepts of comparative literature" and "opens up a new approach to literary texts." Although Rath relies on the definition of the term formulated over twenty years ago by the translation scholar Gideon Toury, she never considers what it might mean for translation.
Shaden Tageldin takes up the recent insistence on "untranslatability," arguing paradoxically that any "untranslatable" language use "is at once relative and absolute, human and divine," and suggesting that comparative literature abandon "the tautology of translatability/untranslatability" for Lu Xun's "hard translation," essentially a strategy of close adherence to the source text. A translation strategy might yield productive insights as part of a literary research project or pedagogy. But would not the emphasis on one such strategy ultimately skew any historical narrative or textual analysis? And why single out an early twentieth-century Chinese use of the strategy when it dates back to antiquity in various cultures, East and West?
Lucas Klein's chapter admirably recommends that translation practice be considered an interpretive act and therefore a form of scholarship, noting that "the denigration of translation relies on a privileging of the 'original' as read in the language of its composition." Klein's approach is to argue by assertion, however, not through detailed cases or fresh data, and his assertions have been so often repeated as to hark back to an earlier situation that no longer obtains in the field. André Lefevere pointed out in 1982 that the concept of authorial originality denigrates translation, and in 2011 the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) adopted a statement on the evaluation of translations as scholarship. If these earlier documents have not substantially altered the institutional status of translation, mere reiteration seems unlikely to help. In what, we might strategically ask, does the translator's originality consist if it cannot be called authorial? And have the MLA guidelines ever been used to evaluate translations in peer review at an American academic institution, whether in North or South America?
Perhaps the most telling signs of how comparative literature continues to marginalize translation appear as blind spots in the 2017 report, unreflective commentary and editing that reveal a real effort to exclude translation studies from the field. In a chapter on the environmental humanities, Heise herself explains that she recently planned an essay on the many translations of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) so as to "highlight the importance of nonfiction prose and documentary film for environmental thought and activism," but "overcome by a sense of unease" she decided that the multiauthored report, The Limits to Growth (1972), was preferable because it "was mentioned most frequently"— only to reject this text as well because it could not be classified as "literary storytelling."
I take the "unease" as symptomatic of institutional contradictions that Heise finds difficult to manage. To research the translations of these nonfiction texts would edge her work toward cultural rather than literary studies, the very tension that the Bernheimer report uncovered in the field, but she wound up making the conservative or backward-looking choice, regardless of the fact that translation analysis comprehends formal features like register and style, discourse and genre — features that can be considered properly "literary." Besides, isn't The Limits to Growth an example of "nonfiction prose"? Would Heise also decline to examine the various versions of a related text like Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1789), which in the century after its publication was translated into French, German, Russian, and Spanish? Ironically, she chose to develop "a more conventional argument" by discussing "environmentalist" novels that include translations from Chinese and Spanish, although she does not comment on these translations as translations, making the instrumentalist assumption that they reproduce semantic invariants in the source texts. The message seems clear: translation research does not qualify as the basis of a "conventional argument" in comparative literature, and the professional unease that translation might cause is better repressed by excluding it altogether through instrumentalism.
This attitude might explain why the most exciting posting about translation on the ACLA website was not included in the printed report. Under the rubric of "practices," Daniela Kato and Bruce Allen describe their study of a medieval Japanese text that is "the product of a locally-inflected environmentalism," and that through numerous modern translations can "carry seemingly far-reaching implications within a comparative ecocritical framework." Kato and Allen's incisive exposition synthesizes a broad range of materials and thereby demonstrates that their project contributes to a number of fields, including Japanese literary history, environmental literary theory and criticism, the theory of world literature, and, most uniquely, translation theory and history. This research is not only comparative, but transnational and eminently interdisciplinary, moving from the local to the global in examining the cultural and social impact of translated texts. Excluding it from Futures of Comparative Literature offers a truncated image of what is possible in the field, raising the question of whether an investment in these futures will yield much of a return.
On the Shoulders of World Literature
The institutional developments that affected translation over the past two decades were motivated in part by the most decisive change that comparative literature has witnessed since the influx of European theoretical discourses in the 1960s and after. Goethe's concept of "world" literature was revived, now informed by categories drawn from Bourdieu's sociology of cultural value and Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory. As a result, the purview of comparative literature became international on a planetary scale. In controversial yet groundbreaking studies like Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (1999) and Franco Moretti's "Conjectures on World Literature" (2000),22 global literary relations consist of a competition driven by the unequal distribution of cultural prestige and authority, on the one hand, and linguistic and literary resources, on the other. Metropolitan centers in the West (Paris, London, New York) assign value to national literary traditions as well as to specific authors and works through such practices as publishing, translation, and award-giving. Genres like the novel evolve in different literatures through the combination of foreign, usually European forms with local content.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Provocations START/STOP 1. Hijacking Translation 2. Proverbs of Untranslatability 3. The Trouble with Subtitles STOP/START Notes