Frawley, • Prolegomenon to a theory of translation (1984)

Berman, • Translation and the trial of the foreign (1985

translated from French by Venuti, La traduction
Venuti comme épreuve de l'étranger)
• Translation, community, utopia (2000)
Frawley - Prolegomenon => introductory/preliminary observations
Translation
• as recodification in many different codes: language, visual code,
cross-modally, auditory, religious, logical propositions
• a problem of semiosis* - (Eco) three types of semiotic transfer:
copying; transcribing (cognition); translating (re-cognition)
semiosis*= an action/process involving the establishment of a
relationship between a sign and its object and meaning
• a problem of transfer of codes
• a secondary semiotic process
semiotic= relating to signs and symbols, esp. written and spoken
signs
• is possible even despite lack of synonymy or identity
• involves two codex: matrix (primary stimulus) and target (goal
of recodification)
• Arguments for identity across linguistic codes:
• the referential: identity= semantic exactness/absolute
synonymy; phenomena, the semantic referents for all
our terms, remain the same for everyone
• The conceptual/biological: identity across language is
possible because humans cognize the world in the same
manner via the same biological apparatus
• Identity relies on the universals of the language system,
that is, universals of coding
• Translation is a linguistic performance, is recodification; recodification is an
uncertain act because of structural mismatch of the codes; The notion of
identity is antithetical to translation; there is information only in difference
• Translation is a bilateral act: the matrix code accomodate the target
code and is in turn accomodated by it. There may be identities across codes
but it's not crucial
• Translation is essentially a third code; it is a subcode of each of the codes
involved; translation has a dual lineage but emerges as a code in its own
right, setting its own standards and structural presuppositions and
entailments – derivatives of the matrix information and target parameters
• Matrix information (input) is phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
• The new text gets away from the translator by dictating its own necessities
and logic
• Good v. bad translation (?); overmatricized text
(automated translation); radical v. moderate recodification/innovation:
Moderate or close translation: close to matrix or target code – only
moderate knowledge produced;
Radical translation: the new code breaks from both matrix and target – new
knowledge potential increase, saying sth new and internally coherent;
• Recodification is the production of a new sign, a "signed translation" the new
code signifies by its own individuation, translation is a unique sign-producing
act not at all derivative
 The general theme of my essay will be translation as the trial
of the foreign (comme épreuve de l’étranger). “Trial of the
foreign” is the expression that Heidegger uses to define one
pole of poetic experience in Hölderlin* (Die Erfahrung des
Fremden).
Now, in the poet, this trial is essentially enacted by
translation, by his version of Sophocles, which is in fact the
Berman last “work” Hölderlin published before descending into
madness.
(incipit) In its own time, this translation was considered a prime
manifestation of his madness.
Yet today we view it as one of the great moments of western
translation: not only because it gives us rare access to the
Greek tragic Word, but because while giving us access to this
Word, it reveals the veiled essence of every translation.
*translation as a dimension of philosophical though
Berman and the foreignness

• aiming to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness: reveal the strangeness v.
attenuate or cancel it;
• reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its most deeply buried, most self-same, but
equally the most “distant” from itself;
• Alain's pov: word-for-word translation = a mosaic of barbarisms
• Foucault's pov: two kinds of translation = in the 1st, sth remains (meaning, aesthetic
value); in the 2nd, the translated language is used to derail the translating language;
• The ethical aim of translating: receive the Foreign as Foreign.
 Berman and the positive and negative analytic
• Analytic in two senses of the term: a detailed analysis of the deforming system, […], but also in the psychoanalytic sense, insofar as the system is largely
unconscious, present as a series of tendencies or forces that cause translation to deviate from its essential aim. The analytic of translation is consequently
designed to discover these forces and to show where in the text they are practiced
• Positive analytic: an analysis of operations which have always limited the deformation, […] These operations constitute a sort of counter-system destined to
neutralize, or attenuate, the negative tendencies
• Negative analytic: analysis of deforming forces (12 forces) constitute so many censures and resistances: a) ethnocentric, annexationist translations and
b) hypertextual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free rewriting), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised
• Only languages that are “cultivated” translate, but they are also the ones that put up the strongest resistance
• the focus => the deforming tendencies that intervene in the domain of literary prose—the novel and the essay; the language-based cosmos that is prose,
especially the novel, is characterized by a certain shapelessness, which results from the enormous brew of languages and linguistic systems that operate in
the work; prose, in its multiplicity and rhythmic flow, can never be entirely mastered. And this “bad writing” is rich. This is the consequence of its
polylingualism; respect its shapeless polylogic and avoid an arbitrary homogenization.
• elaborate an analytic for the translation of novels; locate several deforming tendencies, a systematic whole that is historical: 1 rationalization (discursive
order/risk of abstraction); 2 clarification (from indefinite to explicitation; the show of the concealed/repressed); 3 expansion (TT longer than the ST; addition
that adds nothing and obscure the ST clarity); 4 ennoblement and popularization (rhetorization: elegant from the raw ST; blind recourse to a pseudo-
language to popularize the ST); 5 qualitative impoverishment (reduce the iconic surface of the text, both its sonorous and iconic richness); 6 quantitative
impoverishment (lexical loss; lack of multiplicity in the lexical texture of the ST); 7 the destruction of rhythms (more valid in poetry and theatre, but
certainly true in prose too); 8 the destruction of underlying networks of signification (the hidden dimension of ST, the subtext and its undelying chains); 9
the destruction of linguistic patternings (introducing extraneous element to the ST system that is the author's style); 10 the destruction of vernacular
networks or their exoticization (a vernacular clings tightly to its soil; translation can occur only between cultivated languages); 11 the destruction of
expressions and idioms (ST idiom=TT idiom=> ethnocentrism; to translate is not to search for equivalences); 12 the effacement of the superimposition of
languages (effacing the relationship between dialect and common language, that is, geolects and other regional variants, including sociolects)
 Translation never communicates in an untroubled fashion
because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural
differences of the foreign text by reducing them and
supplying another set of differences, basically domestic,
drawn from the receiving language and culture to enable the
Venuti foreign to be received there.
The foreign text, then, is not so much communicated as
(incipit) inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and interests.
The inscription begins with the very choice of a text for
translation, always a very selective, densely motivated
choice, and continues in the development of discursive
strategies to translate it, always a choice of certain domestic
discourses over others.
 5 case studies
• Abbé Prévost's translation of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa => seven volumes in the EN ST > four in
French TT; Prévost’s text involved abridgement and adaptation;
remainders (Lecercle) = variants of the standard dialect that exceed communication of a universal
meaning and draw attention to linguistic, cultural as well as socio-political factors;
• Creagh's EN translation of Tabucchi's Sostiene Pereira => Creagh’s translation at once inscribed an
English-language cultural history and displaced the historical dimension of Tabucchi’s novel;
the English-language remainder does not just inscribe a domestic set of linguistic and cultural
differences in the foreign text, but supplies the loss of the foreign-language differences which
constituted that text – which had a place in a narrative tradition that includes resistance novels;
• Gilbert's (1946) and Ward's (1988) translation of Camus's L'étranger => Gilbert translated
freely, added words for clarification, revised and softened the abruptness of the French
phrasing, endowed his prose with a formality and politeness; Ward translated closely, reproduced

Venuti •
the lexical and syntactical peculiarities of the French, more evocative of American and French
cultural forms and more communicative of the French text;
Mandelbaum's translation of Ungaretti's poems => the site of an academic community’s interest in

(incipit) Ungaretti’s poetry, an American readership that nonetheless shared an Italian understanding of the
text and in fact included Italian natives; also, a domestic readership that is incommensurable with
the interests of the Italian academics;
• Ash's EN translation of Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse => aimed for a high degree of fluency by translating
freely, making deletions and additions to the French to create more precise formulations in English.

The utopian dimension of translation*

The domestic inscription is made with the very intention to communicate the foreign text, and so it is
filled with the anticipation that a community will be created around that text. […] In supplying an
ideological resolution, a translation projects a utopian community that is not yet realized. […] Implicit in
any translation is the hope for a consensus, a communication and recognition of the foreign text through
a domestic inscription. Yet the inscription can never be so comprehensive, so total in relation to domestic
constituencies, as to create a community of interest without exclusion or hierarchy.
*Ernst Bloch’s theory of the utopian function of culture
 Domestication and foreignization

Venuti
References

• Berman, A.(1985), Translation and the trial of the foreign

(translated from French by Venuti, La traduction comme épreuve de l'étranger)
• Frawley, W.(1984), Prolegomenon to a theory of translation
• Venuti, L. (2000), Translation, community, utopia (2000)