ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, this Romantic foreignizing conception of translation has been picked up and passed on by a succession of brilliant theorists, from Walter Benjamin ( 1892-1940, 'The Task of the Translator' , 1923) through Martin Heidegger ( 1 889-1976, The Principle of Ground, 1957), to George Steiner (After Babel, 1975), Antoine Berman (The Experience of the Foreign, 1984/ 1992), Lawrence Venuti (The Translator's Invisibility, 1995), and others. Like most of their Romantic precursors, these later theorists typically dualize translation and assign overtly moral charges to the two choices: either you domesticate the SL text, cravenly assimilate it to the flat denatured ordinary language of TL culture, or you for eignize it, retain some of its alterity through literalism, and so heroically resist the flattening pressures of commodity capitalism. There are no other alternatives , no middles excluded by the dualism; and the moral imperatives behind the choice, if not always practical in the real world (a translator might be forced to domesti cate in some circumstances, to make a living), are nevertheless irrevocable.
