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The role of the translator

Visibility, ethics and sociology

Key concepts
■■ Venuti: the ‘invisibility’ of the translator and the ethical consequences;
■■ ‘Foreignizing’ versus ‘domesticating’ translation;
■■ Berman: the ‘negative analytic’ and deformation of translation;
■■ The sociology of translation focuses on the role of the translator and the social
nature of translation;
■■ The power network of the translation industry;
■■ The reception of translation – paratexts, reception theory and translation
reviewing.

Key texts
Berman, Antoine (1985b/2021) ‘Translation and the trials of the foreign’, translated by
Lawrence Venuti, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) (2021), The Translation Studies Reader,
4th edition, Routledge: London and New York, pp. 247–60.
Gouanvic, Jean-Marc (2005) ‘A Bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence
of practical instances: Field, “habitus”, capital and illusio’, The Translator 11.2:
147–66.
Hanna, Sameh (2016) Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics
of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt, London: Routledge.
Heilbron, Johan and Gisèle Sapiro (2007) ‘Outline for a sociology of translation’, in
Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari (eds) (2007), Constructing a Sociology of
Translation, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 93–107.
Milton, John and Paul Bandia (eds) (2009) Agents of Translation, Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352461-10 18 7
T he r o le o f the tra n slat o r

Simeoni, Daniel (1998) ‘The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus’, Target 10.1:
1–39.
Venuti, Lawrence (1995/2018) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation,
London and New York: Routledge (2018 edition has a revised introduction).
Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference,
London and New York: Routledge.

9.0 Introduction
Chapter 8 examined varieties of cultural studies that have focused on translation. In
this chapter, we concentrate on other research that deals with the position and involve-
ment of the translator and others involved in the translation process. We see how this is
manifested in the methods and strategies of their translation practice. Section 9.1 looks
at the influential work of Lawrence Venuti, notably the ‘invisibility’ of translation and
the translator in Anglo-American culture (Section 9.1.1) and the ‘domesticating’ and
‘foreignizing’ translation strategies which are available to the translator (Section 9.1.2).
Section 9.1.3 considers work by Antoine Berman that follows a similar line: Berman’s
‘negative analytic’ attacking the homogenization of the translation of literary prose.
Section 9.2 focuses on the ‘positionality’ and ideology of the translator. Section 9.3
introduces recent and increasingly important work on the sociology of translation, and
Section 9.4 deals with crucial aspects of the powerful translation and publishing indus-
try. Section 9.5 examines the reception of translations, notably the reviewing process
and what this reveals about cultural attitudes to translation in general. The case study
shows how one can apply Bourdieu’s sociological method to a specific set of texts.

ITS companion website: watch the introductory video at www​.routledge​.

com​/cw​/munday

9.1 The cultural and political agenda of translation

Like the other cultural theorists discussed in Chapter 8, Venuti insists that the scope
of translation studies needs to be broadened to take account of the value-driven nature
of the sociocultural framework. Thus he contests Toury’s ‘scientific’ descriptive model
with its aim of producing ‘value-free’ norms and laws of translation (see Chapter 7):

The claim of value-free translation research is spurious … far from presenting

comprehensive and incisive accounts of translation, descriptive translation stud-
ies is itself ideological, scientistic in assuming a naive empiricism, conservative
in reinforcing the academic status quo, and anti-intellectual in blocking the
introduction of materials from other fields and disciplines that would expose its
limitations.
(Venuti 2018: x )

It should be noted, however, that Venuti’s criticism is not universally shared, and is
itself contentious. In addition to governments and other politically motivated insti-
tutions, which may decide to censor or promote certain works (compare Lefevere’s

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discussion of control factors in Section 8.1), the groups and social institutions which
allow translations to be published include the various players in the publishing industry
as a whole. Above all, these would be the publishers and editors who choose the works
and commission the translations, pay the translators and often dictate the translation
method. They also include the literary agents, marketing and sales teams and review-
ers. The reviewers’ comments indicate and to some extent determine how translations
are read and received in the target culture. Each of these players has a particular posi-
tion and role within the dominant cultural and political agendas of their time and
place. The translators themselves are part of that culture, which they can either accept
or rebel against.

9.1.1 Venuti and the ‘invisibility’ of the translator

The Translator’s Invisibility (1995/2018) draws on Venuti’s own experience as a trans-
lator of experimental Italian poetry and fiction. Invisibility is a term he uses ‘to describe
the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary British and American cultures’
(Venuti 2018: 1). Venuti sees this invisibility as typically being produced:

(1) By the way translators themselves tend to translate ‘fluently’ into English, to pro-
duce an idiomatic and ‘readable’ TT, thus creating an ‘illusion of transparency’;
(2) By the way the translated texts are typically read in the target culture:

A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged accept-

able by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the
absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giv-
ing the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or
the essential meaning of the foreign text – the appearance, in other words, that
the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original’.
(Venuti 2018: 1)

Venuti (1998: 31) sees the most important factor for this as being ‘the prevailing con-
ception of authorship’. Translation is seen as derivative and of secondary quality and
importance. Thus, English-language practice since Dryden has been to conceal the act
of translation so that, even now, ‘translations are rarely considered a form of literary
scholarship’ (Venuti 1998: 32).

9.1.2 Domestication and foreignization

Venuti discusses invisibility hand in hand with two types of translation: domestica-
tion and foreignization. These practices1 concern both the choice of text to translate
and the translation method. Their roots are traced back by Venuti to Schleiermacher
and his 1813 essay ‘Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’ (Schleiermacher
1813/2012; see Chapter 2 in this volume). Venuti sees domestication as dominating
British and American translation culture. Just as the postcolonialists are alert to the
cultural effects of the differential in power relations between colony and ex-colony,
so Venuti (2018: 15) bemoans the phenomenon of domestication since it involves ‘an

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ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving cultural values’. This entails trans-
lating in a transparent, fluent, ‘invisible’ style in order to minimize the foreignness of the
TT. Venuti allies it with Schleiermacher’s description of translation, which ‘leaves the
reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him’. Domestication
further covers adherence to domestic literary canons by carefully selecting the texts that
are likely to lend themselves to such a translation strategy (Venuti 1998: 241).
On the other hand, foreignization ‘entails choosing a foreign text and developing a
translation method along lines which are excluded by dominant cultural values in the
target language’ (ibid.: 242). It is the preferred choice of Schleiermacher, whose descrip-
tion is of a translation strategy where ‘the translator leaves the writer in peace, as much
as possible, and moves the reader toward [the writer]’ (Schleiermacher 1813/2012: 49).
Venuti (2018: 15–16) follows this, and considers foreignizing practices to be a ‘highly
desirable … strategic cultural intervention’ which seek to ‘send the reader abroad’ by
making the receiving culture aware of the linguistic and cultural difference inherent
in the foreign text. This is to be achieved by a non-fluent, estranging or heterogeneous
translation style designed to make visible the presence of the translator and to highlight
the foreign identity of the ST. This is a way, Venuti says, to counter the unequal and
‘violently’ domesticating cultural values of the English-language world.
In The Scandals of Translation, Venuti links foreignization to ‘minoritizing’ trans-
lation. One of the examples he gives of a minoritizing project is his own translation
of works by the nineteenth-century Italian novelist Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839–69)
(Venuti 1998: 13–20). The very choice of works to translate is minoritizing: Tarchetti
was a minor writer, a Milanese bohemian who confronted the literary establishment by
using the standard Tuscan dialect to write experimental and Gothic novels that chal-
lenged the moral and political values of the day. As far as the language is concerned,
the minoritizing or foreignizing practice of Venuti’s translation comes through in the
deliberate inclusion of foreignizing elements such as modern American slang. These
aim to make the translator ‘visible’ and to make the readers realize they are reading a
translation of a work from a foreign culture. Venuti (ibid.: 15) gives the extract shown
in Box 9.1 as an example of what he means by this approach.

Box 9.1
Nel 1855, domiciliatomi a Pavia, m’era allo studio del disegno in una scuola privata di quella
città; e dopo alcuni mesi di soggiorno aveva stretto relazione con certo Federico M. che era
professore di patologia e di clinica per l’insegnamento universitario, e che morì di apoples-
sia fulminante pochi mesi dopo che lo aveva conosciuto. Era un uomo amantissimo delle
scienze, della sua in particolare – aveva virtù e doti di mente non comuni – senonchè, come
tutti gli anatomisti ed i clinici in genere, era scettico profondamente e inguaribilmente – lo
era per convinzione, nè io potei mai indurlo alle mie credenze, per quanto mi vi adoprassi
nelle discussioni appassionate e calorose che avevamo ogni giorno a questo riguardo.
In 1855, having taken up residence at Pavia, I devoted myself to the study of drawing at a
private school in that city; and several months into my sojourn, I developed a close friendship
with a certain Federico M., a professor of pathology and clinical medicine who taught at the
university and died of severe apoplexy a few months after I became acquainted with him. He

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was very fond of the sciences and of his own in particular – he was gifted with extraordinary
mental powers – except that, like all anatomists and doctors generally, he was profoundly
and incurably skeptical. He was so by conviction, nor could I ever induce him to accept my
beliefs, no matter how much I endeavored in the impassioned, heated discussions we had
every day on this point.2
(Venuti 1998: 15)

Among the elements of this extract which Venuti considers to be distinctive of foreigni-
zation are the close adherence to the ST structure and syntax (e.g., the adjunct positions
in the first sentence), the calques soggiorno as sojourn, indurlo as induce him and the
archaic structure nor could I ever instead of and I could never.

9.A Exploration: Foreignization

Look at the extract in Box 9.1 and identify more foreignizing features in the English TT.

In other passages (see ibid.: 16–17), Venuti juxtaposes both archaisms (e.g., scape-
grace) and modern colloquialisms (e.g., con artist, funk), and uses British spellings
(e.g., demeanour, offence) to jar the reader with a ‘heterogeneous discourse’. Venuti is
happy to note (ibid.: 15) that some of the reviews of the translation were appreciative of
this ‘visibility’. However, other reviews attacked the translation for not following what,
in Venuti’s terms, would be a fluent translation practice.
Importantly, domestication and foreignization are considered to be not binary oppo-
sites, but part of a continuum, and they relate to ethical choices made by the translator
in order to expand the receiving culture’s range:

The terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ indicate fundamentally ethi-

cal attitudes towards a foreign text and culture, ethical effects produced by the
choice of a text for translation and by the strategy devised to translate it, whereas
the terms like ‘fluency’ and ‘resistancy’ indicate fundamentally discursive features
of translation strategies in relation to the reader’s cognitive processing.
(Venuti 2018: 19)

This relationship, operating on different levels, might be depicted as shown in Figure 9.1.
Although Venuti advocates foreignizing translation in this book, he is also aware of
some of its contradictions. No translation can be entirely foreignizing, as he states, since
‘all translation […] is an interpretation that fundamentally domesticates the source text’
(2018: xii). So foreignization is a subjective and relative term that still involves a degree
of domestication. Indeed, foreignization depends on the dominant values of the receiving
culture because it becomes visible precisely when it departs from those values. However,
Venuti stoutly defends foreignizing translations. They ‘are equally partial [as are domesti-
cating translations] in their interpretation of the foreign text, but they tend to flaunt their

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Figure 9.1 Domestication and foreignization: ethical and discursive levels

partiality instead of concealing it’ (2018: 28–9). In addition, Venuti (ibid.: 19) empha-
sizes the ‘culturally variable and historically contingent’ nature of domestication and
foreignization. Just as we saw with the discussion of descriptive studies in Chapter 7, the
values associated with these terms, reconstructed from close textual analysis or archival
research, vary according to external sociocultural and historical factors.
Venuti’s general premises about foreignizing and domesticating translation prac-
tices, and about the invisibility of the translator and the relative power of the publisher
and the translator, can be investigated in a variety of ways by:

■■ Comparing ST and TT linguistically for signs of foreignizing and domesticating

practices;
■■ Interviewing the translators about their strategies and/or researching what the
translators say they are doing, their correspondence with the authors and the dif-
ferent drafts of a translation if available (keeping in mind, however, that translators
are not always conscious of their strategies and that they sometimes are not entirely
reliable or truthful);
■■ Interviewing the publishers, editors and agents to see what their aims are in pub-
lishing translations, how they choose which books to translate and what instruc-
tions they give to translators (again, keeping in mind that their responses need to
be evaluated critically);
■■ Looking at how many books are translated and sold, which ones are chosen and
into which languages, and how trends vary over time;
■■ Looking at the kind of translation contracts that are made and how ‘visible’ the
translator is in the final product;
■■ Seeing how literally ‘visible’ the fact of translation is, looking at the packaging of
the text, the appearance or otherwise of the translator’s name on the title page, the
copyright assignation, translators’ prefaces, correspondence etc.;
■■ Analysing the reviews of a translation, author or period, with the aim of seeing what
mentions are made of the translators (are they ‘visible’?) and by what criteria review-
ers (and the literary ‘élite’) judge translations at a given time and in a given culture.

9.B Exploration: Venuti and invisibility

See the ITS companion website for further discussion of Venuti’s work on invisibility.

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9.1.3 Antoine Berman: the ‘negative analytic’ of translation

Questions of how much a translation assimilates a foreign text and how far it signals dif-
ference had already attracted the attention of the noted French theorist Antoine Berman
(1942–91). Berman’s L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne
romantique (1984), translated into English as The Experience of the Foreign: Culture
and Translation in Romantic Germany (1992), preceded and influenced Venuti. Venuti
himself produced an English translation of the prominent article ‘La traduction comme
épreuve de l’étranger’ (Berman 1985) in English, titled ‘Translation and the trials of the
foreign’ (Berman 1985b/2012). In it, Berman (ibid.: 240) describes translation as an
épreuve (‘experience’/‘trial’) in two senses:

(1) For the target culture in experiencing the strangeness of the foreign text and word;
(2) For the foreign text in being uprooted from its original language context.

Berman deplores the general tendency to negate the foreign in translation by the trans-
lation strategy of ‘naturalization’, which would equate with Venuti’s later ‘domesti-
cation’. ‘The properly ethical aim of the translating act’, says Berman (ibid.: 241),
is ‘receiving the Foreign as Foreign’, which would seem to have influenced Venuti’s
‘foreignizing’ translation strategy at the time. However, Berman considers that there
is generally a ‘system of textual deformation’ in TTs that prevents the foreign from
coming through. His examination of the forms of deformation is termed ‘negative
analytic’:

The negative analytic is primarily concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist

translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free
writing), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised.
(Berman 1985b/2012: 242)

Berman, who translated Latin American fiction and German philosophy, sees every
translator as being inevitably and inherently exposed to these ethnocentric forces,
which determine the ‘desire to translate’ as well as the form of the TT. He feels that it is
only by psychoanalytic analysis of the translator’s work, and by making the translator
aware of the forces at work, that such tendencies can be neutralized. His main attention
is centred on the translation of fiction:

The principal problem of translating the novel is to respect its shapeless polylogic
and avoid an arbitrary homogenization.
(Berman 1985b/2012: 243)

By this, Berman is referring to the linguistic variety and creativity of the novel and
the way translation tends to reduce variation. He identifies 12 ‘deforming tendencies’
(ibid.: 244):

(1) Rationalization: This mainly entails the modification of syntactic structures

including punctuation and sentence structure and order. An example would be
translations of Dostoevsky which remove some of the repetition and simplify

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complex sentence structures. Berman also refers to the abstractness of rationali-

zation and the tendency to generalization.
(2) Clarification: This includes explicitation (compare Section 4.1.2), which ‘aims to
render “clear” what does not wish to be clear in the original’ (ibid.: 245).
(3) Expansion: Like other theorists (e.g., Vinay and Darbelnet, see Chapter 4),
Berman says that TTs tend to be longer than STs. This is due to ‘empty’ explicita-
tion that unshapes its rhythm, to ‘overtranslation’ and to ‘flattening’. These addi-
tions only serve to reduce the clarity of the work’s ‘voice’.
(4) Ennoblement: This refers to the tendency on the part of certain translators to
‘improve’ on the original by rewriting it in a more elegant style. The result,
according to Berman (ibid.: 246), is an annihilation of the oral rhetoric and form-
less polylogic of the ST. Equally destructive is the opposite – a TT that is too
‘popular’ in its use of colloquialisms.
(5) Qualitative impoverishment: This is the replacement of words and expressions
with TT equivalents ‘that lack their sonorous richness or, correspondingly, their
signifying or “iconic” features’ (ibid.: 247). By ‘iconic’, Berman means terms
whose form and sound are in some way associated with their sense. An example
he gives is the word butterfly and its corresponding terms in other languages.
(6) Quantitative impoverishment: This is loss of lexical variation in translation.
Berman gives the example of a Spanish ST that uses three different synonyms for
face (semblante, rostro and cara); rendering them all as face would involve loss.
(7) The destruction of rhythms: Although more common in poetry, rhythm is still
important to the novel, and can be ‘destroyed’ by deformation of word order and
punctuation.
(8) The destruction of underlying networks of signification: The translator needs to
be aware of the network of words that is formed throughout the text. Individually,
these words may not be significant, but they add an underlying uniformity and
sense to the text. Examples are augmentative suffixes in a Latin American text
-jaulón (‘large cage’), portón (‘large door’ etc.).
(9) The destruction of linguistic patternings: While the ST may be systematic in
its sentence constructions and patternings, translation tends to be ‘asystematic’
(ibid.: 249). The translator often adopts a range of techniques, such as rationaliza-
tion, clarification and expansion, all of which standardize the TT. This is actually
a form of incoherence, since standardization destroys the linguistic patterns and
variations of the original.
(10) The destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization: This relates espe-
cially to local speech and language patterns which play an important role in
establishing the setting of a novel. Examples would include the use of diminu-
tives in Spanish, Portuguese, German and Russian, or of Australian English terms
and cultural items (outback, bush, dingo, wombat). There is severe loss if these
are erased, yet the traditional solution of exoticizing some of these terms by, for
example, placing them in italics, isolates them from the co-text. Alternatively,
seeking a TL vernacular or slang equivalent to the SL is a ridiculous exoticization
of the foreign. Such would be the case if an Australian farmer were made to speak
Bavarian in a German translation (compare also the case study of translation
from Punjabi in Chapter 8).

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(11) The destruction of expressions and idioms: Berman considers the replacement
of an idiom or proverb by its TL ‘equivalent’ to be an ‘ethnocentrism’: ‘to play
with “equivalence” is to attack the discourse of the foreign work’, he says (ibid.:
251). Thus, an English idiom from Joseph Conrad containing the name of the
well-known London mental health hospital Bedlam3 should not be translated by
Charenton, a similar French institution, since this would result in a TT that pro-
duces a new network of French cultural references.
(12) The effacement of the superimposition of languages: By this, Berman means the
way translation tends to erase traces of different forms of language that co-exist
in the ST. These may be the mix of American English and varieties of Latin
American Spanish in the work of new Latino/a writers, the blends of Anglo-
Indian writing, the proliferation of language influences in Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake, different sociolects and idiolects, and so on. Berman (ibid.: 251) considers
this to be the ‘central problem’ in the translation of novels.

Counterbalancing the ‘universals’ of this negative analytic is Berman’s ‘positive ana-

lytic’, his proposal for the type of translation required to render the foreign in the TT.
This he calls ‘literal translation’:

Here ‘literal’ means: attached to the letter (of works). Labor on the letter in trans-
lation, on the one hand, restores the particular signifying process of works (which
is more than their meaning) and, on the other hand, transforms the translating
language.
(Berman 1985b/2012: 252–3)

Berman’s term is markedly different and more specific compared to the conventional
use of ‘literal translation’ discussed in Chapter 2; his use of ‘literal’ and ‘letter’ and his
reference to the ‘signifying process’ point to a Saussurean perspective and to a posi-
tive transformation of the TL. How exactly this is to be done, however, depends on
the creativity and innovation of the translator in his search for truth. This is pursued
in Berman’s posthumous work (1995), published in English in Françoise Massardier-
Kenney’s translation as Toward a Translation Criticism (Berman 2009).

9.C Exploration: Negative analytic

The article by Marilyn Booth (2008) on the ITS companion website discusses the ethical issues
behind the domesticating translation of the Girls of Riyadh novel by Egyptian author Alaa
al-Aswany. Note what could be called forms of ‘negative analytic’.

Berman’s work is important in linking philosophical ideas to translation strategies,

with many examples drawn from existing translations. His discussion of the ethics
of translation as witnessed in linguistic ‘deformation’ of TTs is of special relevance
and is a notable counterpoint to earlier writing on literary translation. But ethics also
encompasses the context of translation and those professionals (translators, publishers,

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reviewers etc.) whom Lefevere described (see Section 8.1). The following sections con-
sider various aspects of the sociocultural context, including observations that come
from the participants themselves, beginning with the translators.

9.2 The position and positionality of the translator

Toury (2012: 88; see also Chapter 7 in this volume) warns that explicit comments from
participants in the translation process need to be treated with circumspection since
they may be biased. However, more recent work in translation studies has given greater
value to such comments. At best, they are a significant indication of the subject’s work-
ing practices; at worst, they still reveal what a subject feels he/she ought to be doing.
This section limits itself to English-language translators of Latin American fiction, but
the ideas and arguments that are presented are representative of the writing of many
other translators.
Venuti’s ‘call to action’ (1995/2018), for translators to adopt ‘visible’ and ‘foreigniz-
ing’ practices, is perhaps a reaction to those contemporary translators who seem to
debate their work along lines appropriate to the age-old and vague terms which we
discussed in Chapter 2 – for example, the late Gregory Rabassa (2005) discusses the
relative exigencies of ‘accuracy’ and ‘flow’ in literary translation. Translators also often
consider that their work is intuitive, that they must be ‘led’ by language and listen
to their ‘ear’ (Rabassa 1984: 35; Felstiner 1980: 81; Grossman 2010: 10). In similar
vein, Margaret Sayers Peden, the translator of Latin American authors Sàbato, Fuentes,
Allende and Esquivel, listens to the ‘voice’ of the ST. She defines this as ‘the way some-
thing is communicated: the way the tale is told; the way the poem is sung’, and it deter-
mines ‘all choices of cadence and tone and lexicon and syntax’ (1987: 9). John Felstiner,
who translated Pablo Neruda’s classic poem about Machu Picchu, went as far as to lis-
ten to Neruda reading his poems so as to hear the stresses and the emphases (Felstiner
1980: 51), a similar process he would later follow in translating Paul Celan’s poetry.
In her American retranslation of the classic Don Quixote, Gabriel García Márquez’s
translator Edith Grossman also declares that ‘the essential challenge of translation [is]
hearing, in the most profound way I can, the text in Spanish and discovering the voice
to say (I mean, to write) the text again in English’ (Grossman 2003/2005: xix).
The ‘invisibility’ of translators has been such that relatively few of them have writ-
ten in detail about their practice. However, this has changed more recently with the
publication of Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s (2003) account of his collaboration with
Borges, of Grossman’s (2010) volume Why Translation Matters and of the memoirs of
perhaps the most celebrated translator of all, Gregory Rabassa (2005), not to mention
translator blogs and online interviews with translators. Two other full-length works of
import by contemporary literary translators of Latin American Spanish are Felstiner’s
Translating Neruda: The Way to Machu Picchu (1980) and Levine’s The Subversive
Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991). Felstiner (1980: 1) makes the impor-
tant point that much of the work that goes into producing a translation ‘becomes invis-
ible once the new poem stands intact’. This includes the translator’s own background
and research as well as the process of composition. Felstiner describes his immersion
in the work and culture of the ST author, including visits to Machu Picchu itself and
his reading of Neruda’s poem in that environment. However, he still uses age-old terms
to describe ‘the twofold requirement of translation’, namely, ‘the original must come

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through essentially, in language that itself rings true’ (Felstiner 1980: 24). Phrases such
as come through essentially and ring true are typical of the approaches of early transla-
tion theory discussed in Chapter 2, and suggest that there is a mystique about the ‘art’
of translation.
On the other hand, Levine sees herself (1991: xi) as a ‘translator–collaborator’ with
the Cuban author Cabrera Infante, and as a ‘subversive scribe’, ‘destroying’ the form
of the original but reproducing the meaning in a new form (ibid.: 7). Levine some-
times creates a completely different passage in translation in order to give free rein to
the English language’s propensity to punning, surprising the reader with a mixture of
the Latin American and the Anglo-Saxon. One example, from Cabrera Infante’s Tres
tristes tigres, is the translation of the first line of the song ‘Guantanamera’ (‘Yo soy
un hombre sincero’) as ‘I’m a man without a zero’, playing on the sound of the words
(sincero meaning ‘sincere’, but phonetically identical to sin cero, meaning ‘without a
zero’) (ibid.: 15). Levine also (ibid.: 23) invents humorous names of books and authors
(such as I. P. Daley’s Yellow River and Off the Cliff by (H)ugo First) to replace a list in
the Spanish ST. This would appear to be a very domesticating approach, altering whole
passages to filter out the foreign and to fit in with the target culture expectations. Yet
the ‘jarring’ linguistic result in English, juxtaposed to a Latin American context, goes
some way to creating what would be a ‘foreignizing’ reading. For Levine, adopting a
feminist and poststructuralist view of the translator’s work, the language of translation
also plays an ideological role:

A translation should be a critical act … creating doubt, posing questions to the

reader, recontextualising the ideology of the original text.
(Levine 1991: 3)

The stance and positionality of the translator have become much more central in trans-
lation studies. Chapter 8 described some of the forms in which translation is manipu-
lated by the ideology of the sociocultural context. Such an ideological effect has its
counterpart in the stance of the translator him- or herself. Maria Tymoczko, in an
article titled ‘Ideology and the position of the translator: In what sense is a translator
“in between”?’, echoing Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space’ (see Chapter 8), takes issue with
those who see the translator as a neutral mediator in the act of communication:

[T]he ideology of a translation resides not simply in the text translated, but in the
voicing and stance of the translator, and in the relevance to the receiving audi-
ence. These latter features are affected by the place of enunciation of the transla-
tor: indeed they are part of what we mean by the ‘place’ of enunciation, for that
‘place’ is an ideological positioning as well as a geographical or temporal one.
These aspects of a translation are motivated and determined by the translator’s
cultural and ideological affiliations as much as or even more than by the temporal
and spatial location that the translator speaks from.
(Tymoczko 2003: 183)

Tymoczko (ibid.: 199) rejects the ‘Romantic’ and ‘élitist’ western notion of uncommit-
ted, individual translators working away on their own and concludes (ibid.: 201) that
‘effective calls for translators to act as ethical agents of social change must intersect with

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models of engagement and collective action’. Carol Maier (2007), herself both translator
of Latin American literature and a translation studies theorist, names this positioning
‘intervenience’ and the translator ‘an intervenient being’. That this extends beyond the
literary to include technical, volunteer and other forms of translation is also evident from
the volume devoted to translator activism, co-edited by Boèri and Maier (2010), part of
what Wolf (2012) sees as the ‘activist turn’ in sociological approaches to translation.

9.D Exploration: The translator’s turn

Two areas where the role of the translator has become visible are in the study of translator
drafts (e.g., Munday 2013, 2014) and the translator as a character in fiction (e.g., Kaindl and
Spitzl 2014).

9.3 The sociology and historiography of translation

Since the turn of the millennium, the study of translators and the social nature of trans-
lation have taken centre-stage in translation studies research. This includes the dramatic
increase in works of translation historiography, as we suggested in Chapter 2, but most
strikingly encompasses the simultaneous development of a ‘sociology’ of translation
(cf. Pym 2006, Wolf and Fukari 2007; Heilbron and Sapiro 2007; Milton and Bandia
2009; Vorderobermeier 2014; Angelelli 2014; Tyulenev 2014; Blakesley 2018a, b).
Many studies have drawn on the work of French ethnographer and sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu (1977, 1991) and his concepts of:

■■ Field of social activity, which is the site of a power struggle between participants or
agents – for us, this field is translation and the participants potentially include the
author, commissioner, publisher, editor, translator and reader; at the same time,
there is the field of power, which partially conditions the field of cultural produc-
tion and the field of translation;
■■ Habitus, which is the broad social, identitary and cognitive make-up or ‘disposi-
tion’ of the individual, which is heavily influenced by family and education; habitus
is particularly linked to field and to cultural capital and has been central to recent
sociological work in translation studies;4
■■ The different types of capital which an individual may acquire or be given – these
comprise the more tangible economic capital (money and other material assets) and
the more intangible: social capital (such as networks of contacts), cultural capital
(education, knowledge) and symbolic capital (status);
■■ Illusio, which may be understood as the cultural limits of awareness;
■■ Heteronymy and autonomy, which refer to how dependent the respective field is
on the field of power; so a literary field characterized by heteronomy is focused on
publishing best-sellers, whereas an autonomous literary field is characterized by
translations from non-hegemonic languages and potentially avant-garde or mar-
ginalized literature.
■■ Doxa, a term that indicates the dominant ideological tenets of the target culture;
■■ Naming, which refers to the definition of the field;

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If we want to study the translations published in a single target language, like Italian,
we first focus on the Italian literary field. In Bourdieu’s terms, we need to situate the
Italian literary field within a broader context, which he defines as the field of power.
The field of power sets the conditions under which the literary field operates: the
amount of autonomy and heteronomy that Italian writers and agents have in terms of
the literary market.
When studying why one language is translated from more than another language
in a given target culture, it is helpful to draw on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capi-
tal. So the reason why modern Italian poets translated more than modern French
poets from Greek and Latin is that Classical Greek and Latin poetry were consid-
ered more prestigious in the Italian literary field than in the French literary field.
On the other hand, the reason that there were more translations from non-western
and peripheral European languages published by French poets compared to English
poets was owing to the more autonomous and diversified publishing market in
France.
The reason why English poets translated considerably more poetry as a genre than
Italian or French poets did was because translation was more of a side activity for them.
Whereas Italian and French poets often translated to make a living, English poets trans-
lated more often as a hobby, and not as a full-time vocation. English poets were less
concerned, in other words, with the economic capital accruing to them through trans-
lation. Instead, French and Italian poets, often having to work as full-time translators,
had to translate whatever texts they were commissioned, which were often fiction or
non-fiction books, not poetry books (Blakesley 2018a).
The doxa of poetry translation are visible in the choice of poetic forms and styles,
for example. In English, for instance, translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy regularly
censured vulgar language and bodily functions mentioned in Dante’s text. So, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, Henry Francis Cary, in his best-selling translation,
rendered merda as grimed, and where Dante speaks of a devil farting (‘elli avea del
cul fatto trombetta’), Cary chose a euphemism, referring to a ‘sound obscene’ (suono
osceno) and ‘hinder passage’. Another translator, J. A. Carlyle in 1849, eliminated
anatomy entirely: ‘and he of his–had made a trumpet.’ If we compare these nineteenth-
century renderings with a twenty-first-century translation by Sandow Birk and Marcus
Sanders, ‘The chief ripped a huge fart in salute as they went’, we can see clearly how the
linguistic doxa have changed (cf. Blakesley 2021).
At the same time, we can see the shift in religious doxa as well if we compare
Arabic and English translations of the Divine Comedy. In Inferno canto 28, Dante puts
Muhammad (and Ali) in Hell. In Arabic and Persian translations, this section is either
omitted entirely or the names of Muhammad and Ali are removed, leaving only pro-
nouns (Blakesley 2021). This is related to the field of power as a whole, since ideological
state apparatuses are responsible for this type of censorship.
Bourdieu’s work has been adopted by some scholars as a less deterministic alterna-
tive to the polysystem framework (see Chapter 7), especially as a means of theorizing
the role of the translator, which seemed worryingly absent from earlier theories. An
early but still seminal article in this vein is by the late Daniel Simeoni (1948–2007). In
‘The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus’ (Simeoni 1998), he overtly seeks a bet-
ter conceptualization of what drives the translator’s disposition and decision-making

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and how this comes to be. Simeoni stresses that the study of the ‘translatorial habi-
tus’ complements and improves on Toury’s norm-based descriptive translation stud-
ies (see Chapter 7) by focusing on how the translator’s own behaviour and agency
contribute to the establishment of norms. In his study of the modern-day translator,
Simeoni rather depressingly concludes that translation is a poorly structured activity
where ‘most translating agents exert their activity in fields where their degree of con-
trol is nil or negligible’ (ibid.: 14) and that their habitus is generally one of ‘voluntary
servitude’.
In her introduction to the special issue of The Translator devoted to Bourdieusian
concepts, Inghilleri (2005b) more positively considers that research employing
Bourdieu’s theorization can help us understand how translators and interpreters are
‘both implicated in and able to transform the forms of practice in which they engage’.
Jean-Marc Gouanvic’s work is important in this context. His monograph Sociologie
de la traduction (‘Sociology of translation’; Gouanvic 1999) examines French transla-
tions of American science-fiction, and his article in the Inghilleri collection (Gouanvic
2005) investigates the habitus of three major French translators of American litera-
ture, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, Marcel Duhamel and Boris Vian. Here, the habitus
as an integral part of the individual translator’s history, education and experiences is
emphasized:

the habitus, which is the generative principle of responses more or less well
adapted to the demands of a certain field, is the product of an individual history,
but also, through the formative experiences of earliest infancy, of the whole col-
lective history of family and class.
(Bourdieu 1991: 91, in Gouanvic 2005: 158–9)

Although Gouanvic claims that lexical and prosodic choices revealing the ‘voice’ of the
translator are ‘not a conscious strategic choice but an effect of his or her specific habitus,
as acquired in the target literary field’ (ibid.: 158), the relation between these choices
in the text and the translator’s ‘disposition’ is far from evident. What exactly causes a
translator to act in a given way in a given situation, and why does one translator act dif-
ferently from another? Sociology was the main ‘new perspective’ in translation studies
treated in Duarte et al. (2006). Andrew Chesterman’s paper ‘Questions in the sociology
of translation’ stresses that the importance of this approach lies in emphasizing transla-
tion practice, how the translator and other agents act as they carry out their tasks in
the translation process or ‘event’ and what the interrelation is between these agents –
what Pym (2006: 4) terms ‘causation’. As well as specific questions, Chesterman briefly
describes the application of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Buzelin (2005: 215)
sees the advantages of this, analysing the roles of each agent, participant or mediator
in the network and ‘[providing] solid bases for testing interpretative hypotheses relat-
ing to the nature of the translation process’. In translation studies, the theory has been
applied to the translation of poetry (Jones 2011), amongst others. A third approach
draws on the social systems work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, and features
strongly in the work of Hermans (2007) and Tyulenev (2012). In contrast to Latour,
Luhmann views society as a complex of closed functional systems that operate beyond
the immediate influence of humans.

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9.E Exploration: Sociological models

Read Buzelin (2013) for a summary of the three approaches (Bourdieu, Latour, Luhmann)
presented here.

9.4 The power network of the translation industry

In presenting their ‘Outline for a sociology of translation’, Heilbron and Sapiro (2007:
95) assert the elements that must be covered by this approach: ‘firstly, the structure of
the field of international cultural exchanges: secondly, the type of constraints – political
and economic – that influenced these exchanges; and thirdly, the agents of intermedia-
tion and the processes of importing and receiving in the recipient country’.
As far as the economics is concerned, the translator’s lot may be miserable. Venuti
(1992: 1–3, 1998: 31–66) has already described and lamented how the literary trans-
lator works from contract to contract, often for a usually modest flat fee, with the
publishers (rather than translators) initiating most translations and generally seeking
to minimize the translation cost. Publishers, as Venuti shows, are very often reluctant
to grant copyright or a share of the royalties to the translator. Venuti deplores this as
another form of repression exercised by the publishing industry, but it is a repression
that is far from uncommon because of the weakness of the translator’s role in the net-
work. Fawcett (1995: 189) describes this complex network as amounting to a ‘power
play’, with the final product considerably shaped by editors and copy-editors. This
most often results in a domesticating translation. Interviews with publishers confirm
that it is often the case that the editor is not fluent in the foreign language and that the
main concern is that the translation should ‘read well’ in the TL (Munday 2008).
In some cases, the power play may result in the ST author’s omission from the
translation process altogether: Kuhiwczak (1990) reports the dramatic fate of Milan
Kundera’s The Joke, whose first English translator and editor, working jointly, decided
to unravel the ST’s intentionally distorted chronology in an attempt to clarify the
story for the readers. Kundera was sufficiently shocked to use his dominant position to
demand a new translation. Venuti (1998: 6) questions Kundera’s role, including the use
of the previous translator’s work without acknowledgement, claiming that ‘Kundera
doesn’t want to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences that a translation must
negotiate.’ Such conflict, of course, does not normally materialize when the author
is long dead, or unknown, as is the case for Stephen Mitchell’s new poetic ‘version’
of the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh. In the preface, Mitchell openly recognizes his
omission of what he calls ‘some of the quirks of Akkadian style’, such as repetitions
and enumerations. He also adds links between passages as well as occasionally altering
their order to create what he defends as a more coherent poem, ‘faithful to the original
Akkadian text’ (Mitchell 2005: 66).
A range of other agents play key roles in the preparation, dissemination and fash-
ioning of translations. These include commissioners, mediators, literary agents, text
producers, translators, revisers and editors. The volume edited by Milton and Bandia
(2009) provides detailed examples of such cultural ‘gate-keepers’, to use Bourdieu’s
term, whose work has been innovative either stylistically or politically. In similar vein,

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Haddadian-Moghaddam’s book on literary translation in modern Iran presents an

innovative three-tier model for the study of agency at the levels of decision-making,
motivation and contextual constraints (2014: 27).
For many authors writing in other languages, the benchmark of success is to be
translated into English. In fact, the decision whether or not to translate a work is the
greatest power wielded by the editor and publisher. According to Venuti (1998: 48),
publishers in the UK and USA tend to choose works that are easily assimilated into
the target culture. The percentage of books translated in both countries is extremely
low, comprising only between 2 and 4 per cent of the total number of books pub-
lished (Venuti 2018: 11). On the other hand, not only is the percentage of books trans-
lated in many other countries much higher, but the majority of those translations are
also from English (ibid.). Venuti sees the imbalance as yet another example of the cul-
tural hegemony of British and American publishing and culture. It is very insular and
refuses to accept the foreign, yet is happy for its own works to maintain a stronghold
in other countries. Venuti had expressed this in damning terms in the introduction to
Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology:

It can be said that Anglo-American publishing has been instrumental in pro-

ducing readers who are aggressively monolingual and culturally parochial while
reaping the economic benefits of successfully imposing Anglo-American cultural
values on a sizeable foreign readership.
(Venuti 1992: 6)

9.F Exploration: Translation flows and statistics

‘Translation flows’, the number of books translated into and out of a language, are indica-
tors of the direction of cultural exchange (see Casanova 2002/2010, Heilbron 1999/2010).
Read the reports on the European literary translation sector available online (www​.ceatl​.eu​/
current​-situation​/translation​-statistics). How far do these statistics support the claims made
by Venuti? Look for similar statistics regarding your own language(s).

9.5 The reception and reviewing of translations

The link between the workings of the publishing industry and the reception of a given
translation is clearly made in Meg Brown’s in-depth study of Latin American novels
published in West Germany in the 1980s. She stresses (Brown 1994: 58) the role of
reviews in informing the public about recently published books and in preparing the
readership for the work. Brown adopts ideas from reception theory, including examin-
ing the way a work conforms to, challenges or disappoints the readers’ aesthetic ‘hori-
zon of expectation’. This is a term employed by Jauss (1982: 24) to refer to readers’
general expectations (of the style, form, content etc.) of the genre or series to which the
new work belongs.
One way of examining the reception is by looking at the reviews of a work, since
they represent a ‘body of reactions’ to the author and the text (Brown 1994: 7) and form
part of the sub-area of translation criticism in Holmes’s ‘map’ (see Chapter 1). Reviews

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are also a useful source of information concerning that culture’s view of translation itself,
as we saw in Section 9.1.2, where Venuti (1998: 18–20) uses literary reviews as a means of
assessing the reception of his foreignizing translation of Tarchetti. Venuti quotes reviews
that criticize the translation specifically because of its ‘jarring’ effect. This links in with
Venuti’s observations (1995/2018: 2–3) that most English-language reviews prefer ‘fluent’
translations written in modern, general, standard English that is ‘natural’ and ‘idiomatic’.
Venuti considers such a concentration on fluency and the lack of discussion of trans-
lation as prime indicators of the relegation of the translator’s role to the point of ‘invis-
ibility’. The TT is normally read as if the work had originally been written in the TL,
the translator’s contribution being almost completely overlooked. There are several
reasons for the lack of focus in reviews on the process of translation. One of these,
noted by the American reviewer Robert Coover (in Ronald Christ 1982: 17), is that
‘whenever cuts are requested by the publishers of a review, the first to go are usu-
ally the remarks about the translation’. Many reviewers are also not able to compare
the ST with the TT (ibid.: 21), and restrict themselves to often critical comments on
individual words. Ronald Christ’s article is one of the few relatively detailed discus-
sions of issues related to translation reviews. Another, by Carol Maier (1990), looks
at reviews of Latin American literature in general. Maier goes a step further by noting
how North American reviewers diminish the foreignness of a translation ‘by focusing
almost exclusively on [its] potential role in English, comparing it to “similar” works
in North American literature and evaluating the ease with which it can be read’ (ibid.:
19). She sees translation reviewing as being ‘largely undeveloped’ (ibid.: 20) and makes
a series of suggestions, among which is the need ‘to incorporate the contributions of
translation theory and translation criticism into the practice of reviewing’.
There is no set model for the analysis of reviews in translation, although the whole
gamut of paratexts (devices appended to the text) is the subject of the cultural theorist
Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1997).5 Genette considers two kinds of paratextual ele-
ments: (1) peritexts and (2) epitexts.

■■ Peritexts appear in the same location as the text and are provided by the author or
publisher. Examples given by Genette (ibid.: 12) are titles, subtitles, pseudonyms,
forewords, dedications, prefaces, epilogues and framing elements such as the cover
and blurb.
■■ An epitext ‘is any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within
the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical
and social space’ (ibid.: 344). Examples are marketing and promotional material,
which may be provided by the publisher, correspondence on the text by the author,
and also reviews and academic and critical discourse on the author and text which
are written by others. The paratext is ‘subordinate’ to the text (ibid.: 12), but it is
crucial in guiding the reading process. For example, a reader who first encounters a
review of a book will approach the text itself with certain preconceptions based on
that epitext. If we additionally adopt the analytical approach of reception theory
(Jauss 1982), we can analyse reviews synchronically or diachronically. An example
of a synchronic analysis would be an examination of a range of reviews of a single
work; examples of a diachronic analysis would be an examination of reviews of
books of an author or newspaper over a longer time period.

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9.G Exploration: Reception

Read the article, available through the ITS companion website, on reviews of the work of
Roberto Bolaño by Esperança Bielsa (2013). Note the different peritextual and epitextual ele-
ments discussed and how Bolaño’s image differs in Spain and the UK.

Case study
This case study presents a sociological analysis of translation of Shakespeare plays
into Arabic, drawing on Sameh Hanna’s pathbreaking book, Bourdieu in Translation
Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt (2016).
This book is one of the first in English to comprehensively examine literary translation
with a Bourdiesian model.
In Hanna’s book, we find very clearly outlined crucial Bourdieusian concepts, some of
which we will discuss here: fields, naming, economic and symbolic capital and doxa. To
investigate Egyptian translations of Shakespeare’s plays, Hanna outlines the ‘genesis of
the field of drama translations in Egypt’ (Hanna 2016: 74). The field of drama transla-
tion is a subfield of the larger field of cultural production. As he says, ‘The field of drama
translation, which emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Egypt, is
largely the product of this field of power’ (ibid.: 74). In doing so, he presents the two key
institutions in the field of power during the first half of nineteenth-century Egypt: the
military who ruled, and the Islamic religious scholars (the ulama) who ran educational
institutions and oversaw cultural life. At the same time, starting in the mid-nineteenth
century, the ulama’s hold on society was somewhat lessened owing to a new class of
secular, educated elite. The conflict between the two elites – religious and lay – played an
important factor in the development of literature and culture more generally.
Having outlined the field of power, Hanna then turns to the field of cultural pro-
duction. When speaking of theatre in Arabic, we come to a particular problem. In
Arabic literary tradition, there was no genre of drama, in the western sense. There was
therefore no Arabic term to describe this type of literary text. Bourdieu refers to this
terminological problem, in fact, as ‘the power of naming’ (ibid.: 82). Naming is crucial
because, from the sociological viewpoint, there is a power struggle over the division
of every field of activity. This struggle may be explicit or implicit. So the first attempt
at finding an Arabic term for theatre was by the conservative religious Egyptian his-
torian ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī in 1800. He uses the negative Arabic term mala‘īb,
which means ‘trickeries’, or ‘acts of deception’ (ibid.: 84). Instead, the later translator
Rifā‘a al-Ṭahṭāwī in the 1830s refers to theatre more positively, combining the words
for playing (la‘ib) and imaginative (khayālī) (ibid.: 87). These two different notions of
theatre – one referring to an intellectual artform, the other referring to mass entertain-
ment – ‘conditioned the practice of early theatre makers and drama translators’ (ibid.:
10). At the same time, this also was reflected in the translation of drama itself. Hanna
here borrows Bourdieu’s dichotomy of heteronomy versus autonomy. Heteronomous
drama translation, in Hanna’s words, is where the translations are domesticating ‘at
the expense of the source text plays’ (ibid.: 11). Heteronomous translators ‘were com-
missioned to produce stage translations inspired by foreign texts for the troupes of

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comic theatre’ and were obliged to meet the demands of the audience, while autono-
mous translations were carried out by translators who did not depend financially on
it (ibid.: 108). This meant they could translate as they wished. In this particular case,
they were able to further the goal of fidelity and of being closer to the source texts
than heteronomous translators. However, we must bear in mind that heteronymy and
autonomy are not static and fixed positions: they change over time. So Hanna shows
how during the late nineteenth century, including turn-of-the century Egypt, hetero-
nymous translations were dominant. Yet, starting in 1912, autonomous translations
started becoming more prevalent owing to important changes in the field, such as new
agents in the field, new theatrical troupes and the new option of publishing translated
drama, instead of just staging it (ibid.: 99). There were also two other types of transla-
tion, semi-heteronymous and semi-autonomous, although they blended into each other
and weren’t always entirely distinguishable.
In a chapter dedicated to changing doxa, Hanah shows how and why a late twenti-
eth-century Egyptian translator translated into a predominantly Egyptian vernacular
rather than Modern Standard Arabic (fusha). The doxa Hanna refers to here, then,
are linguistic in origin. Translators from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries trans-
lated generally into fusha because this language variety was far more prestigious and
acceptable than Egyptian dialect. This is largely because fusha’s prestige was owing
to the fact that it was based on the language of the Quran and other sacred writings
about Muhammad (namely, the Hadith). Writers and translators using fusha more eas-
ily gained symbolic capital, insofar as their work was found acceptable and prestigious
by the elite. Hanna gives a prominent example of Jūrj Abyaḍ’s theatrical troupe. In
general, tragedy was a genre high in symbolic capital, which was until recently only
translated into fusha.
Meanwhile, writers (and translators) using Egyptian dialect faced innumerable
problems with publishing their work, and were often criticized for being anti-Islamic.
They also didn’t acquire symbolic capital with their work, since it was not appreciated
by institutional figures, but only enjoyed by the less-educated classes. Examples given
by Hanna include those belonging to theatrical genres of ‘slapstick comedy, farce and
vaudeville’ (ibid.: 183) written in varieties of Egyptian dialect.
However, one Egyptian writer in particular, Mustapha Safouan, deliberately went
against this doxic practice by translating Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello into Egyptian
dialect in the final years of the twentieth century. Hanna shows how this linguistic
choice is tied to Safouan’s desire to reach a broader audience that would include both
the highly educated as well as the common reader. Yet even more important is the
second reason why Safouan chose Egyptian dialect, which is linked to his ‘political
agenda’: in Safouan’s view, the use of fusha ‘suppresses difference and downgrades
diversity’ (ibid.: 190). By choosing more authentic language spoken by his intended
Egyptian readership, he aimed to inspire critical views of Arab politicians who, like
Othello, are fallible and inspired by ‘false ideals’ (ibid.: 191).

Discussion of the case study

Hanna’s use of Bourdieusian sociology allowed him to effectively study translation
practices and translation agency in modern Egypt. The rigorous use of concepts out-
lined above – fields, doxa, naming, economic and symbolic capital – contextualized

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translation activity within a dynamic theoretical framework. It must be stressed, just as

Hanna does, that these concepts are not to be used in a static manner, since they change
over time. Fields are born, shift and die. Doxa are often transformed with new political
regimes or cultural movements. Initial definitions of fields and genres, exemplified in
‘the power of naming’, can be overridden by newer definitions. Economic and symbolic
capital are acquired, spent, lost, regained.
At the same time Hanna so expertly situates the translators in a broad cultural
portrayal, he also analyses passages of the translations themselves. Microanalysis of
passages illustrates and confirms larger theoretical shifts in fields, capital or doxa. In
other words, Bourdieu’s sociology is used both as a way to contextualize translations
and to analyse translation excerpts themselves.

Summary
This chapter has focused on the role of the (mainly literary) translator. The key term
in the first part of the chapter has been Venuti’s ‘invisibility’. This refers to how, in
Anglo-American cultures, the foreign is made invisible both by publishing strategies
and by the preference for a ‘fluent’ TT that erases traces of the foreign. Venuti discusses
two strategies, ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’, favouring the latter in a policy of
‘resistance’ to the dominant ‘ethnocentrically violent’ values of publishers and literary
reviewers. Berman, an important influence on Venuti, also discusses the need for trans-
lation strategies that allow the ‘foreign’ to be experienced in the target culture.
The second part of the chapter sites the agents or participants in the translation
process in a network which plays out power struggles over text, culture and ‘symbolic
capital’: practising translators, who often view their work in vague terms; publishers,
who drive and are driven by market forces worldwide; and reviewers, who represent
one form of the reception of the TT. The translator as agent has become central to work
in these areas. In order to understand the interaction in a more sophisticated or opera-
tional form than was possible with polysystem theory, translation studies has imported
what are sometimes competing concepts from sociology (Bourdieu, Latour, Luhmann
etc.). The case study of Egyptian Arabic translations of Shakespeare illustrates a model
of applying Bourdieusian sociology to translations.
Meanwhile, the work of Venuti and of Berman has links both to those cultural
studies theorists discussed in Chapter 8 and the philosophical approaches examined in
Chapter 10, where the concept of the foreign and its linguistic, hermeneutic and ethical
relationship to the source is paramount. Indeed, Venuti (2013: 3) discusses how he later
developed what he describes as ‘a more rigorously conceived hermeneutic model that
views translation as an interpretive act, as the inscription of one interpretive possibility
among others’.

Further reading
For influences on Venuti’s work, see Schleiermacher (1813/2004; see also Section 2.5)
and the references in Chapter 10 on translation and philosophy. For more on Berman,

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see Berman (1984/1992, 1985a/1999, and particularly 1995/2009). For some trans-
lators’ accounts of their own work, as well as online interviews, see the website of
PEN America (https://pen​.org​/current​-members​/translator​-resources/) and the website
of The American Literary Translators Association (www​.literarytranslators​.org/), and
also the very useful collection of short articles by Balderston and Schwartz (2002).
For translation and creativity, see Boase-Beier and Holman (1999), Loffredo and
Perteghella (2006), and Kaindl, Kolb and Schlager (2020). For more on translator
activism, see Tymoczko (2010) and Boéri (2019). For methods of historical research,
see Pym (1998) and Bastin and Bandia (2006). For reception theory, see Jauss (1982),
and for the reception of translation, including reviews, see Gaddis Rose (1997) and
Brems and Ramos Pinto (2013). See Kang (2015) for online reviews. For book covers,
read Harvey (2003). For translation and ethics, read Pym (2001), Tymoczko (2003),
Bermann and Wood (2005), Maier (2007) and Alvstad (2020). For sociology, read
Simeoni (1998), Inghilleri (2005a), Buzelin (2005), Chesterman (2006), Wolf and
Fukari (2007), Hermans (1999, 2007), Sapiro (2008), Angelelli (2014), Sapiro (2014),
Vorderobermeier (2014), Tyulenev (2012, 2014), Hanna (2016), Blakesley (2018a, b)
and Wolf (2018). For Bourdieu, read Bourdieu (1993: ‘Field of cultural production’).

Discussion and research points

1 Read and summarize Venuti’s own descriptions of foreignizing and domesticating prac-
tices, fluency and resistancy. How do ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ differ from
terms such as ‘literal’ and ‘free’ (see Chapter 2)? How useful are the terms as ‘heuristic
research tools’, as Venuti has suggested? Note the later developments in Venuti’s posi-
tion (Venuti 2013: 3–4; Venuti 2018).
2 Translate a short literary text into your TL. Translate it first using a domesticating and
then a foreignizing orientation. In what areas do differences occur in your translations?
How does this affect the image of the source culture? Try doing the same using a trav-
elogue or tourist brochure as an ST.
3 How far do you agree with Venuti’s statement (1992: 10) that ‘any attempt to make
translation visible today is necessarily a political gesture’? What kinds of ethical decisions
does a translator have to make?
4 Read in detail Berman’s account of his negative analytic. How far do the points match
the phenomena discussed in the linguistic theories of Chapter 4? Analyse a literary text
and its TT using Berman’s categories. Which categories seem to be the most promi-
nent in your analysis? Are there other related phenomena which you feel need to be
accounted for? Discuss how it would be possible to introduce a ‘positive analytic’ into
the TT.
5 Think about a specific target culture. What are the reigning doxa that you can identify
that will affect the publication of translations?
6 How far are the concepts of domestication/foreignization, visibility, positive/negative
analytics, ethics, habitus and gatekeepers etc. relevant for non-literary translation?

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T he r o le o f the tra n slat o r

The ITS companion website at www​.routledge​.com​/cw​/munday

contains:
■■ A video summary of the chapter;
■■ A recap multiple-choice test;
■■ Customizable PowerPoint slides;
■■ Further reading links and extra journal articles;
■■ More research project questions.

Notes
1 Called ‘strategies’ in the first edition of The Translator’s Invisibility.
2 Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1977) Racconti fantastici, ed. N. Bonifazi, Milan: Guanda, translated
by Lawrence Venuti (1992) as Fantastic Tales, San Francisco, CA: Mercury House.
3 A colloquial pronunciation of the hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem. From the seventeenth
century onwards, bedlam became a common byword for ‘mad confusion’.
4 Originally published in French as Seuils (‘Thresholds’) in 1987.
5 See Simeoni (1998) and also Gouanvic (2005: 157, fn. 15).

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