The Dichotomic Notion of Translation in Lawrence Venuti’s Theory; Consistent Pattern Between Parentheses

Abstract

This study focuses on Lawrence Venuti’s respective views on translation as a dichotomy. Venuti’s dichotomous thinking of translation is based on two contradicting or different approaches and models. This line of thought is clearly manifested in Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1994), where he presents two different strategies for translation, namely, domestication and foreignization. The former is concerned with localizing the translated text and making it original. The latter, by contrast, is characterized by preserving the foreign character and the cultural values of the original text. Venuti indicates domestication dominates the translation into English in both Britain and America in the modern era, where the translator becomes invisible due to the fluency of translation. After about a quarter of a century, such dichotomic tendency of translation is presented in Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019), where he introduces two models to understand translation. That is, instrumentalism and hermeneutics. The first model conceives translation as ‘the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect.’ On the contrary, the hermeneutic model represents a vociferous uprising against instrumentalist thinking while treating translation as a purely interpretive act that inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to intelligibility and interests in the receiving culture. Therefore, Venuti criticizes the influence of the instrumentalism approach that has dominated translation since antiquity, in as much as this method is restricted by orthodox thought, which, in turn, hinders the growth of translation and marginalizes its importance. On the other hand, he offers his hermeneutic approach, as the best solution for the advancement of translation. Fundamentally, these ideas in their entirety rest on a different dichotomic basis for understanding translation, but there is some overlap between them.