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 think all cats are wild. They only act tame if there´s a saucer of milk in it for them.
The right to bear arms? What about the right to live?
What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.
I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.
Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.
Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.
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