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.
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world.
All music is is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
I stumbled onto the best profession to heal my childhood: the only one that lets you release and express whatever is ugly and messy and beautiful about your life. We're in the business of creating human beings. The more we spew, and the more honestly we do it, the better. Try that on Wall Street.
But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.