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.
We are confronted by the appearance of social institutions unintentionally created, vital for the welfare of society, which are not the result of reasoned planning
No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.
What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.
Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?
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