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Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Routledge Library Editions: Translation Book 2) Lawrence Venuti
Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Routledge Library Editions: Translation Book 2) Lawrence Venuti
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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
TRANSLATION
Volume 2
RETHINKING TRANSLATION
RETHINKING TRANSLATION
Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology
Edited by
LAWRENCE VENUTI
First published in 1992 by Routledge
This edition first published in 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 1992 Collection as a whole, Routledge; individual contributors
© respective contributor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this
reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies
may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and
would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to
trace.
Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity,
Ideology
Errata
Edited by
Lawrence Venuti
ISBN 0-415-06050-8
ISBN 0-415-06051-6 (pbk)
For Michael and Lucille Venuti
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Lawrence Venuti
1 TRANSLATING ORIGINS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
PHILOSOPHY 18
Andrew Benjamin
2 TRANSLATION AS SIMULACRUM 42
John Johnston
3 GENDER AND THE METAPHORICS OF
TRANSLATION 57
Lori Chamberlain
4 TRANSLATION AS (SUB)VERSION: ON TRANSLATING
INFANTE'S INFERNO 75
Suzanne Jill Levine
5 MERRILL'S VALERY: AN EROTICS OF TRANSLATION 86
Jeffrey Mehlman
6 MISTRANSLATION, MISSED TRANSLATION:
HELENE CIXOUS' VIVRE L'ORANGE 106
Sharon Willis
7 TRANSLATION AND THE POSTCOLONIAL
EXPERIENCE: THE FRANCOPHONE NORTH
AFRICAN TEXT 120
Samia Mehrez
8 TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL HEGEMONY:
THE CASE OF FRENCH-ARABIC TRANSLATION 139
Richard Jacquemond
vn
CONTENTS
Vlll
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
XI
INTRODUCTION
that situate the translated text in its social and historical circumstances
and consider its cultural political role. This would involve examining
the place and practice of translation in specific cultures, addressing such
questions as which foreign texts are selected for translation and which
discursive strategies are used to translate them, which texts, strategies,
and translations are canonized or marginalized, and which social groups
are served by them.
Such a translation hermeneutic assumes a notion of agency that allows
for the full complexity of the translator's work. Following other post-
structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault, it treats the translating
subject as discursively constructed in self-presentations, theoretical state-
ments, legal codes, contracts, the very process of developing a translation
strategy, of selecting and arranging signifiers.23 Yet it seeks to avoid any
deterministic view of the translator's work that would foreclose the
possibility of critical reflection and political action by imagining that the
translation process admits various levels of calculation which are con-
tingent on material determinations. The translator is the agent of a
cultural practice that is conducted under continuous self-monitoring and
often with active consultation of cultural rules and resources, ranging
from dictionaries and grammars to other texts, discursive strategies, and
translations, both canonical and marginal. But insofar as these rules and
resources are specific to the target-language culture and operative in
social institutions, the translation is located in an intertextual and
ideological configuration that may escape the translator's consciousness
to some extent and result in unanticipated consequences, like social
reproduction or change.24 The translator's unconscious is textual, since,
as Derrida indicates, 'a text can stand in a relationship of transference
(primarily in the psychoanalytical sense) to another text' ('Border Lines,'
p. 147), mapping trajectories of desire through tropes and intertextual
relations. Yet this is necessarily a political unconscious as well,
sedimented with ideological contradictions, shaped by institutional
constraints, involving translation in larger, social conflicts. Most
importantly, these material determinations and effects need not remain
entirely unconscious: a socially aware and politically engaged translator
can reckon them in the choice of a foreign text and the development of a
discursive strategy, taking the target language on what Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari would call a 'line of escape' from the cultural and
social hierarchies which that language supports, using translation to
'deterritorialize' it.
Alternative translation practices that can effect such a deterritorializa-
tion have been appearing in the wake of poststructuralist textual theory.
These are partly the result of problems created by the daunting task of
translating Derrida's inventive and self-reflexive writing into English. In
discussing an English-language version of Derrida's essay 'La myth-
11
LAWRENCE VENUTI
ologie blanche/ Philip Lewis argues for a more sophisticated translation
strategy that acknowledges the complications poststructuralism has
brought to translation, particularly the concept of meaning as a differen-
tial plurality, and that therefore shifts the translator's attention away
from the signified 'to the chain of signifiers, to syntactic processes, to
discursive structures, to the incidence of language mechanisms on
thought and reality formation, and so forth/ What is at stake here is a
'new axiomatics of fidelity' which Lewis terms 'abusive': the translator
seeks to reproduce whatever features of the foreign text abuse or resist
dominant cultural values in the source language, yet this reproductive
effort requires the invention of analogous means of signification that are
doubly abusive, that resist dominant cultural values in the target
language, but supplement the foreign text by rewriting it in that
language. Lewis observes that
the real possibility of translation - the translatability that emerges in
the movement of difference as a fundamental property of languages -
points to a risk to be assumed: that of the strong, forceful translation
that values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the
polyvalencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by
producing its own.
(p. 41)
Abusive fidelity clearly entails a rejection of the fluency that dominates
contemporary translation in favor of an opposing strategy that can aptly
be called resistancy. Hence, it has so far proved most useful in translating
texts that foreground the play of the signifier by cultivating polysemy,
neologism, fragmented syntax, discursive heterogeneity - namely, post-
structuralist theoretical statements, postmodern narratives, and feminist
experiments in prose and poetry that reflect Helene Cixous's concept of
ecriture feminine. Both the Quebec writer Nicole Brossard and her
translator Barbara Godard, for example, aim to combat the hierarchical
construction of gender identities in patriarchal ideology by developing a
kind of writing that is 'working (in) the in-between/ pursuing 'a
multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and
transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between, from
which woman takes her forms (and man, in his turn; but that's his other
history)' ('The Laugh of the Medusa/ p. 287). The result is an extremely
discontinuous textuality in which the translator inventively joins in the
production of meaning, undermining conventional representations that
not only subordinate translator to author, but also metaphorize author-
ship as male and translation as female. Because resistant translation
strategies preclude the illusionistic effect of transparency in the translated
text, their implementation carries other, equally political consequences.
On the one hand, such strategies can help to make the translator's work
12
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operculum of Limulus (Fig. 153, 10). The form of the operculum,
more particularly of the median process, differs in the male and
female. In that which is believed to be the female (Fig. 162) the
median process is long, and extends beyond the posterior margin of
the operculum; it is formed of two small five-sided parts at the base
which are united at the sides to the two plates of the operculum;
behind this is a long, unpaired part, which is pointed in front; this,
together with the remaining parts, is not joined to the side-plates of
the operculum, so that the latter are here separated from one
another. The third part of the median process is shorter than the
second, and bears at its end a pair of small pointed and diverging
plates, the tips of which reach to the middle of the third plate-like
appendages. On the inner side of the operculum there are, in the
female, a pair of curved, tubular organs, attached to the anterior end
of the median process, where they open, the free ends being closed;
the function of these organs is not known, but was probably sexual.
In the male (Fig. 163, A, a) the median process is formed of two
parts only, and is very short, so that the two plates of the operculum
unite behind the process.
In the female a median process (Fig. 163, B) is also present
between the second pair of appendages (belonging to the third
segment of the mesosoma); it consists of a basal unpaired part, and
of a pair of long pointed pieces which project on to the next segment.
Just as in the case of the genital operculum the basal part is united in
front to the appendages, the remainder being free, and separating
the greater part of the two plate-like appendages. In the complete
animal the median process of this segment is covered by the median
process of the genital operculum. The remaining appendages of the
female, and all the appendages behind the operculum in the male,
are without any median process, and the plates of each pair unite by
a suture in the middle line.
Fig. 163.—Eurypterus fischeri, Eichw. Upper Silurian. (After
Holm.) A, Genital operculum of male; a, median process. B,
Middle part of second appendage of the mesosoma in the female,
showing the median process.
BY
SUB-CLASS II.—EMBOLOBRANCHIATA.[238]
Order I. Scorpionidea.
External Structure.
Internal Anatomy.
Classification.
More than 350 species of scorpions have been described, but many
of these are “doubtful,” and probably the number of known forms
may be put at about 300. These are divided by Kraepelin[247] into six
families and fifty-six genera. The best indications of the family of a
scorpion are to be found in the shape of the sternum, the armature of
the tarsi, and the number of the lateral eyes, while assistance is also
to be derived from the shape of the stigmata and of the pectines, and
from the absence or presence of a spine beneath the aculeus.
The six families are: Buthidae, Scorpionidae, Chaerilidae,
Chactidae, Vejovidae, and Bothriuridae.
Fam. 1. Buthidae.—Sternum small and generally triangular.
Tibial spurs in the third and fourth legs. Generally a spur beneath
the aculeus. Lateral eyes three to five in number.
There are two sub-families: Buthinae and Centrurinae.
The Buthinae, which possess a tibial spur, comprise fourteen
genera, most of them Old World forms. The principal genera are
Buthus, which contains about 25 species, and Archisometrus with 20
species. One genus only, Ananteris, is South American, and it
includes only a single species. The genus Uroplectes, with 16 species,
is almost entirely African.
The Centrurinae, without tibial spur, are New World scorpions,
though Isometrus europaeus (maculatus) is cosmopolitan. The
principal genera are Tityus with 30 species, Centrurus with 13, and
Isometrus with 6.
Fam. 2. Scorpionidae.—Sternum broad and pentagonal, with
sides approximately parallel. No tibial spur, but a single pedal spur.
Generally three lateral eyes.
Nearly a hundred species of Scorpionidae have been described,
distributed among fifteen genera. The following sub-families are
recognised: Diplocentrinae, Urodacinae, Scorpioninae,
Hemiscorpioninae, and Ischnurinae.
The Diplocentrinae have a spur under the aculeus. They form a
small group of only eight species. The principal genus, Diplocentrus,
is entirely Neotropical, but Nebo has a single Old World
representative in Syria.
The Urodacinae, with the single genus Urodacus, are Australian
scorpions. As in the next sub-family, there are rounded lobes on the
tarsi, but there is only a single keel on the “tail,” and the lateral eyes
are two in number. Six good and three doubtful species are
recognised.
The Scorpioninae are Asiatic and African forms, and are
recognised by the tarsi having a large lobe on each side, by the
convex upper surface of the “hand,” by the presence of two median
keels on the “tail,” and by the possession of three lateral eyes.
Palamnaeus (Heterometrus) has sixteen species in the Indian
region. There are about thirty species of Opisthophthalmus, all
natives of South Africa. Pandinus includes about ten species, but
there are only two species of the type genus Scorpio, S. maurus and
S. boehmei.
The sub-family Hemiscorpioninae was formed for the reception of
the single Arabian species Hemiscorpion lepturus. Its most striking
characteristic is the cylindrical vesicle of the tail in the male.
The Ischnurinae differ from the Scorpioninae chiefly in the
absence of the tarsal lobes, the presence of a well-marked finger-keel,
and the generally more depressed form of the body and hand. In the
opinion of some authors they should be separated from the
Scorpionidae as a distinct family, the Ischnuridae. There are more
than twenty species, divided among six genera. The type genus
Ischnurus has only the single species I. ochropus. There are eight
species of Opisthacanthus, which has representatives in Africa and
America.
Fam. 3. Chaerilidae.—Sternum pentagonal with median
depression or “sulcus” rounded posteriorly. Two pedal spurs.
Stigmata circular. Two lateral eyes with a yellow spot behind the
second. Pectines very short.
This small family has the single genus Chaerilus with but seven
species, natives of the Oriental region.
Fam. 4. Chactidae.—Two pedal spurs. Two lateral eyes (or,
rarely, no eyes) but without yellow spot. Characteristic dentition on
movable finger of “hand.”
There are three sub-families, Megacorminae, Euscorpiinae, and
Chactinae.
The Megacorminae include but a single Mexican form,
Megacormus granosus. There is a single toothed keel under the
“tail,” and all the under surface is spiny. There is a row of long
bristles under the tarsus.