Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.
Interpretation
Translation involves reshaping a text to fit another culture, often losing its original essence and causing a form of cultural violence.
Lawrence Venuti’s quote highlights the complex and often problematic nature of translation. He suggests that translating a text into a language and cultural context that is foreign to it not only alters its meaning but also strips it of its unique cultural identity. This 'ethnocentric violence' implies that translation can homogenize diverse cultures by imposing the norms of the receiving culture, ultimately reducing the richness and diversity of the original work.
In practice
Using this quote during a seminar on translation ethics.
Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
I'm just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me.
The true philosopher and the true poet are one,_x000D_ and a beauty, which is truth,_x000D_ and a truth, which is beauty,_x000D_ is the aim of both.
Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things that we do not see.
It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.
It is not that we keep His commandments first and that then He loves but that He loves us and then we keep His commandments. This is that grace which is revealed to the humble but hidden from the proud.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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