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Example research essay topic: Late Twentieth Century Target Language - 1,598 words

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Translation Theory To accredit the use-values is inevitably to opt for what domesticates or familiarizes a message at the expense of whatever might upset or force or abuse language and thought, might seek after the unthought or unthinkable in the unsaid or unstable. On the other hand, 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 poly valencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own. Abusive translation respects the usages neither of the source language text nor of the target language -- though he is careful to insist that the translator not abuse just anything, but gravitate toward each "key operator" or "decisive textual knot" that arises, those "specific nubs in the original that stand out as clusters of textual energy. The translator's aim is to re articulate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, re mobilize; and extend this abuse in another milieu where, once again, it will have a dual function -- on the one hand, that of forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath (it is as if the translation sought to occupy the original's already unsettled home, and thereby, far from "domesticating" it, to turn it into a place still more foreign to itself). For translators who feel constrained by the tyranny of the us-system, "common usage, " the way things are said and done, the only correct way to translate this or that, the way you have to translate if you want to be published, read, understood -- this is a powerfully attractive formulation. It liberates translators from the dual jail cells of fidelity to the source-language text and communication with the target language reader.

Not that it cuts translators entirely adrift from texts and readers, let alone from addressing both in significant ways; but especially with certain types of texts, difficult texts that themselves "abuse" source language usage, like lyric poetry and deconstructive theory, it liberates the translator to experiment, to tamper, to extend the creative act of writing "difficultly" or "abusively" into the target-language text. But there are also serious problems with this theory. 1. at the bottom the weakest sort of translation, which seeks to restore or naturalize in the target language abusive turns in the source language, so that the target language text conforms to standard target-language usage, and becomes what Venuti calls "invisible" or "domesticated"; 2. in the middle a stronger sort that seeks to reproduce in the target language the author's abuses of the source language, producing a strange or foreign ized or visible text that manifestly abuses the target - language but stands in a problematically complicit ous relation to the source language text; and 3. at the top the strongest and most forceful kind of translation, what we might call abusive translation proper, which introduces its own target-language abuses into the abusive source-language text, generating a text that abuses both the source-language text and the target-language linguistic system. The problem that bothers experts more, however, is its implicitly normative glorification of violence.

It's not just that abuse usually means hitting or hurting someone (usually someone weaker); it's also that all the eulogistic terms in the theory are aligned with strength and domination, all the dyslogistic terms with weakness and submission. It seems to want to idealize hegemonic violence against the weak out of it, but it creeps right back in (or never left in the first place) in the assumption that strong, forceful translation is abusive and weak, servile translation is nonabusive. The abusive parent's aim is to re articulate analogically the abuse that occurred in his or her childhood home, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, re mobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu where, once again, it will have a dual function -- on the one hand, that of forcing the familial system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the context that it replicates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath (it is as if the abuse sought to occupy the parent's parents' already unsettled home, and thereby, far from "domesticating" it, to turn it into a place still more foreign to itself). Lawrence Venuti says of an abusive or foreignizing translation of Catullus that he is praising by the seventeenth-century English translator John Nott that "its abusiveness (even if homophobic by late-twentieth-century standards) conveyed Catullus's Roman assumption that a male who submitted to anal and oral intercourse-whether willingly or not -- was humiliated whereas, 'the penetration himself was neither demeaned nor disgraced'... ." Maybe it's only bizarre by late-twentieth-century standards?

For Catullus -- at least according to one late-twentieth-century commentator-forced or unforced anal or oral sex between two males was humiliating or abusive to the penetrated, not to the penetration; or, to take only the most extreme part of that cultural norm, anal rape was only considered abusive for the abused, not the abuser. Surprise, surprise. The rapist, the penetration, is neither demeaned nor disgraced -- nor abused. Only the rape victim is. 32 The only real surprise comes when Venuti, who is ostensibly on the side of the downtrodden in all this, the oppressed, the victims of sexism and colonialism and so on, insists that the dissident translator resist hegemonic norms by perpetuating that abuse in English translation -- though only, of course, in purified (textual ized, hence transcendentalize d) form. There are any number of tricky questions here.

One is whether (and although Lewis and Venuti never raise the issue, they both tacitly seem to assume that this is in fact the case) abuse is not simply so endemic to patriarchy as to be unavoidable. If so, what (if anything) should we do about it? Try not think about it (the liberal solution)? Hope that if you don't talk about it, don't even think about it, it " ll go away?

Or simply accept the situation and learn to live with it, for example, by euphemizing it, met aphorizing it, purifying it? For example, should we attempt to turn the abuse back against the abuser? If, for example, we decide that Catullus (backed by his whole society) is abusive toward the penetrates of willing or forced male-male sex, perhaps we should go ahead and translate abusively, but only in order to abuse the abuser (s), to raise contemporary readers' discomfort levels so as also to raise their awareness about the abuse being perpetrated in (and through) the text -- perhaps ultimately to disabuse them of their veneration for an abusive classic? The concept of abuse remains too abstract to do much with.

It lacks contextual details, textures, channels, social situations, and human agents. It is an abstract potentiality in language "itself, " language pulled away (abstracted or abused) from actual speech situations, which are conceived as enemy territory, the locus of the us-system of ordinary usage. The problem with this demonization of usage, of course, is that it implicitly reduces all usage to ordinariness and thus makes it impossible (and undesirable) to explore abuse too as a form of usage, something people do to each other in real social situations. First usage is idealized as ordinary; then all usage that falls outside that ideally circumscribed category is called something else, "abus age, " a significant deviation from usage. Wonderfully enough, this allows the theorist to naturalize abuse philosophically by denaturalizing it socially.

Abuse, which is perfectly ordinary in patriarchal usage, both linguistic and behavioral is re conceived as un ordinary and therefore deviant from that usage, therefore recuperable as a philosophical operation that is implicitly parasitic on ordinary usage but explicitly superior to it. Ordinary usage is conceptualized restrictively to exclude deviance, abusiveness, precisely in order to flip the hierarchy and privilege the excluded category -- in a de socialized realm where abuse has no real victims, only virtual ones, and thus no pain, no trauma, no dynasties of wounding in which the pain inflicted on one generation is passed on to the next. Bibliography Baker, Mona (ed. 1998) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London & New York: Routledge. Beau grande, R.

de and W. Dressler (1981) Introduction to Text Linguistics, London & New York: Longman. Hatim, Basil and Jeremy Munday (2004) Translation: an advanced resource book, London & New York: Routledge. Larson, Mildred (1984, 2 nd ed. 1998) Meaning-Based Translation: A Guide to Cross-Language Equivalence, Lanham, New York & London: University Press of America Munday, Jeremy (2001) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and applications, London & New York: Routledge. Nida, Eugene (1964) Towards a Science of Translating, Leiden: E.

J. Brill Nida, Eugene and Charles Taber (1969) The Theory and Practice of Translation, Leiden: E. J. Brill Shuttleworth, Mark and Moire Cowie (1997) Dictionary of Translation Studies, Manchester: St Jerome.

Venuti, Lawrence (ed. 2000 / 2004, 2 nd edition) The Translation Studies Reader, London & New York: Routledge.


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Research essay sample on Late Twentieth Century Target Language

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