ABSTRACT
The key term in this chapter is Venuti’s ‘invisibility’. In Anglo-American cultures, the foreign is made invisible both by publishing strategies and by a ‘fluent’ TT that erases traces of the foreign. Venuti discusses two strategies, ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’, favouring the latter in a policy of ‘resistance’ to the dominant ‘ethnocentrically violent’ values of publishers and literary reviewers. Berman, an important influence on Venuti, also discusses the need for translation strategies that allow the ‘foreign’ to be experienced in the target culture.
The second part of the chapter describes the network which plays out power struggles over text, culture and ‘symbolic capital’: practising translators, publishers and reviewers. The translator as agent has become central to work in these areas. In order to understand the interaction, translation studies has imported what are sometimes competing concepts from sociology (Bourdieu, Latour, Luhmann etc.). The case study of Egyptian Arabic translations of Shakespeare illustrates a model of applying Bourdieusian sociology.
The work of Venuti and of Berman has links to cultural studies theorists discussed in Chapter 8 and the philosophical approaches examined in Chapter 10, where the concept of the foreign and its linguistic, hermeneutic and ethical relationship to the source are paramount.
