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.
Interpretation
Translation alters the original text and can undermine the author's intent.
In this quote, Lawrence Venuti reflects on the complex nature of translation, suggesting that it is not merely a transfer of words from one language to another but rather a transformation that can lead to a distortion of the original author's ideas and voice. He warns that through the act of translating, the translator may assert their own authority, ultimately overshadowing the original work and its cultural nuances.
In practice
In a lecture on the impact of translation, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of preserving the original voice of authors.
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.
Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.
It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
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