CLAS 532
March 3, 2025
New Media & Translation; Venuti & (In)visibility

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

1. Audiovisual Translation Studies: visual, aural, oral resources & meaning-making/codes (film et al.) > Multimodal Studies (synchronized semiotics of language, image, color, music, perspective)

• interlingual & intralingual subtitling, dubbing, voice-over, audio description, surtitling in film, etc.
• fansubs, video game translation > portmanteau “transcreation” in game localization/adaptation?
• US Dept. of Labor Occupational Outlook for translators; ATA Careers in Interpreting & Translation; SCS Related Careers Page (Careers for Classicists: Graduate Student Edition)

2. Globalization & Localization – GILT industry

• crowdsourcing, active participation – prosumers & consumers; altering translation & target audience dynamic
• effects of ubiquitous translation & marketing: elision of linguistic & cultural differences – homogenization, generalization, flattening, loss of nuance, complexity, etc.?
  

3. Corpus-based Translation Studies: analysis of electronic collections of texts (comparison of non-translated & translated texts, analysis of discourse & stylistics, computer-assisted translation tools); Digital Humanities

• IBYCUS (David Woodley Packard; 1967 Harvard diss., “A Study of the Minoan Linear A Tablets”) > PHI Digital Texts
• TLG (University of California at Irvine, accessible via UA library databases)
• TLL (München, accessible via UA library databases)
• Translation Alignment Projects (Furman University et al.): reflecting current approaches to reading & language acquisition in Digital Age
• AI?

4. Translator/Translation (In)visibility (Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn. London, 2008)

• resisting highly domesticated translations that privilege fluency, TL readability, illusion of ST/TT transparency – assimilation produces restrictions on meaning & networks of signification + translator invisibility
• post WW II communications revolution: “valorizing a purely instrumental use of language . . . and thus emphasizing immediate intelligibility and the appearance of factuality” (p. 5) – in literary translation neglect of form, poetics, modality (“gisting” semantics vs. play of signifiers & pleasure of texts, contradictions & complexities)
• ethnocentric violations of signifying chains inevitable even in foreignizing translation (loss/gain); extremes of domesticating inscription of British & American values & standards of intelligibilty > cultural narcissism, monolingualism (“imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home”, p. 13) – strategic resistance in self-aware, ethnodeviant translation highlighting linguistic & cultural differences
• “symptomatic” reading of translations: revealing “symptoms” of biases, etc. (vs. humanistic translation, after Derrida) – how, not what a text means in specific cultural & subjective context, i.e. avoiding illusion of transparency & equivalency, embracing discontinuities of translation & heterogeneity of ST/TT, “A symptomatic reading . . . is historicizing: it assumes a concept of determinate subjectivity that exposes both the ethnocentric violence of translating and the interested value of its own historicist approach” (p. 32)
  
  
  
  
• Venuti’s symptomatic readings of Robert Graves’s domesticating Suetonius & Cold War era concerns about homosexuality (Penguin; 2025 translation by Tom Holland) vs. Ezra Pound’s foreignizing The Seafarer – 1911 (“May I for my own self song’s truth reckon, / Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days / Hardship endured oft. / Bitter breast-cares have I abided . . .”); alliteration, archaisms, anachronisms, syntax, coinages, kennings, omissions, seafarer's fierce individualism, etc. to find a compelling space between SL and TL?
  
  S. A. J. Bradley’s Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1982) [The Seafarer 26-30]:
  
  No protective kinsman could comfort the inadequate soul.
  He, therefore, who has experienced life’s pleasure in cities,
  and few perilous journeys, insolent and flown with wine,
  little credits how I, weary, have often had to remain on the
  ocean path.
  
  Pound (read by poet-translator):
  
  Not any protector
  May make merry man faring needy.
  This he little believes, who aye in winsome life
  Abides ’mid burghers some heavy business,
  Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
  Must bide above brine.
  
  [nænig hleomæga
  feasceaftig ferð frefran meahte.
  Forþon him gelyfeð lyt, se þe ah lifes wyn
  gebiden in burgum, bealosiþa hwon,
  wlonc ond wingal, hu ic werig oft
  in brimlade bidan sceolde.
  
  (lit., “No cheerful kinsman can comfort the poor soul. Indeed he credits it little, the one who has the joys of life, dwells in the city, far from terrible journey, proud and wanton with wine, how I, weary, often have had to endure in the sea-paths.”)]
  

• Reports; Exercise #2 due March 24