ABSTRACT
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (trans. André Lefevere) The search for alternatives to fluent translation leads to theories and practices that aim to signify the foreignness of the foreign text. At the turn of the nineteenth century, foreignizing translation lacked cultural capital in English, but it was very active in the formation of another national culture-German. In 1813, during the Napoleonic wars, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lecture Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersetzens (“On the Different Methods of Translating”) viewed translation as an important practice in the Prussian nationalist movement: it could enrich the German language by developing an elite literature and thus enable German culture to realize its historical destiny of global domination. And yet, surprisingly, Schleiermacher proposed this nationalist agenda by theorizing translation as the locus of cultural difference, not the homogeneity that his ideological configuration might imply, and that, in various, historically specific forms, has long prevailed in English-language translation, British and American. Schleiermacher’s translation theory rested on a chauvinistic condescension toward foreign cultures, a sense of their ultimate inferiority to German-language culture, but also on an antichauvinistic respect for their differences, a sense that Germanlanguage culture is inferior and therefore must attend to them if it is to develop.
