Usuario:Rocio.clementejimenez/Taller

Domestication (Translation)

Domestication, as in the field of Translation Studies, designates the type of translation in which a transparent, fluent style is adopted so as to minimise the strangeness of the foreign text for target language readers. The term was coined by Lawrence Venuti (1953), an important contemporary translation theorist and historian. According to Venuti, domestication consists of ‘an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home’. Such reduction of ‘foreignness’ of the original text in the target text is done through the use of syntactic structures, words, as well as other formal textual conventions familiar to readers and causes a transparency effect on them. This concept was developed in his book The Translator’s Invisibilty: A History of Translation (1995).

The Author

Lawrence Venuti was born in Philadelphia in 1953 and graduated from Temple University. He is an American theorist of translation from Italian, French and Catalan. Venuti is currently a professor of English at Temple University and an editor of The Translator, a specialized journal devoted to translation and minority issued in 1998.

The Translator's Invisibility as a concept

To understand his ideas on translation, it is important to first become familiar with a concept that Venuti proposes and which he criticizes: the invisibility of the translator. It is a recurring idea in his books and articles that forms the basis of his translation theory. Venuti denounces that today in Anglo- American culture there is a tendency to make English translators invisible. Most publishers, critics, and readers find a translation acceptable if they can read it fluently, that is, when they get the illusion of not being reading a translation, but a text originally written in English. Consequently, the crucial intervention of the translator is hidden, the translator being systematically rendered invisible. According to Venuti, the invisibility of the translator is closely related to translations following the method of domestication and has several negative effects. On the one hand, it reinforces the hegemony of the English language. Venuti denounces that by accustoming English-language readers to these types of translations, Anglo-American culture becomes more narcissistic and less receptive to foreign values. On the other hand, the invisibility of translators affects the profession by giving justification to its poor economic and social conditions.

References

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