Classics 532
February 17, 2025
Culture, Gender, Ethnocentrism, Ethics & Translation



*Translation Exercise #1 due February 24 (11:59pm in D2L)*

1. “The cultural turn”: development from systems theories, skopos theory & influence of cultural studies (esp. gender & postcolonial studies) on TS > foreignization vs. domestication, translation ethics & ethnocentrism

• view of translation as rewriting of ST in new cultural context (Lefevere, e.g. Anne Frank diary, Ar. Lys. 1119 τῆς σάθης ἄγε): culturally determined products subject to literary system's controls inside (professionals > poetics) and outside (ideological, political, moral, economic impact of patrons & cultural institutions)

2. Translation & gender: sexist language in translation's often gendered self-representation & patriarchal models of authorship

• Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation”: translation figured in terms of paternity, paternal authority, Oedipal complex, legitimacy, betrayal of/fidelity to ST (chastity, beauty, etc.) – secondary status & “feminine” reproductive (vs. creative) act
  
  “This survey of the metaphors of translation would suggest that the implied narrative concerns the relation between the values of production versus the value of reproduction. What proclaims itself to be an aesthetic problem is represented in terms of sex, family, and the state, and what is consistently at issue is power.” (p. 269 in Venuti)
  
  Cf. Horace, Ep. 2.1. 156 (re Roman conquest & cultural appropriation) Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit 
  
  
• exploring less hierarchical & more dynamic models of ST/TT relationship vs. male/female power-binary, e.g. intertextuality & reception; is “creative” writing itself a predominantly reproductive act?

3. Postcolonial translation theory: power imbalances & assymetries in translation/translation studies (languages, cultures), assimilation & distortion of STs into TL hegemonic discourse (long history, esp. East/West); hegemony of English in translation industry

• “committed approaches” to translation (ideology, identity, politics, etc.)?
  
  
• modern “colonization” of classical texts vs. preserving differences?

4. Venuti & invisibility: extreme domestication of STs > secondariness & translator invisibility (translation ethics)

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

• Berman: domesticating translation & “negative analytic” (vs. “receiving the foreign as foreign”)
  
  “The negative analytic is primarily concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free rewriting), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised. Every translator is inescapably exposed to this play of force, even if he (or she) is animated by another aim.” (p. 249 in Venuti)
  
  
• twelve tendencies of deforming, ethnocentric, homogenizing translation re order-resisting heteroglossia in novel (e.g. Moby Dick, Ulysses):
  
  rationalization (regularizing sentence structure, punctuation)
  clarification (“render ‘clear’ what does not wish to be clear in the original”; polysemy to monosemy)
  expansion (empty additions, “overtranslation”)
  ennoblement
  qualitative impoverishment (inevitable substitution of terms less rich in form & sound)
  quantitative impoverishment (loss of signifiers/variation)
  destruction of rhythms
  destruction of underlying networks of signification (loss of linkage among grouped signifiers)
  destruction of linguistic patternings (rationalization & homogenization of ST resulting in deformed/lost coherence)
  destruction of vernacular networks (replacing or exoticizing vernaculars with "equivalents" in TL)
  destruction of expressions and idioms (subsitution of "equivalents" as ethnocentrism, e.g proverbs)
  effacement of the superimposition of languages (substitution of koine for heteroglossia)
  
  
• “positive analytic” = literal translation (“attached to the letter (of works)”, but not just semantics) as only form of ethical translation, vague focus on creatively restoring “the particular signifying process” and “transform[ing] the translating language” (cf. Schleiermacher), i.e. foreignizing translation – translating Aeschylus' Agamemnon (preserving openness & ambiguity, networks of signification, form of tragic, esp. choral poetry, etc.); A. E. Housman, “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy”?

5. The sociology of translation (Bourdieu)

• habitus: acquired disposition/character of translator & its influence on translation; capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic = status) in translation