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Berman and Venuti's Views on Translating the Foreign Translators have practiced different kinds of strategies to render texts

written in source languages into target languages. After deciding on the text to be translated, the decision that needs to be given is related to the method to be applied to produce the target text. Because strategies in producing translations inevitably emerge in response to domestic cultural situations (Venuti in Baker 1998a: 240) and because translation scholars like Venuti and Berman are not pleased with the current position of translations and the translator in their domestic cultural situations, they call for resistance to fluency in translations. Only then, Venuti (1994) claims, the translator can be visible, which is the position s/he deserves. In this response paper, my aim is to focus on the concepts of fluency and violence and also the strategy of expansion. The German philosopher and theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, categorized translation strategies into two: domesticating and foreignizing. Venuti (in Baker 1998a: 242) explains that these strategies can be described as bringing the author back home and sending the reader abroad, respectively. While the translator sticks to the literary canon that reflects the target language and culture as a result of domesticating the text, s/he prefers to mirror the differences of the foreign text due to the culture it represents as a result of foreignizing. Both Berman (in Venuti 2000) and Venuti (1998) are in favor of the latter as can be seen in their writings. According to Berman, foreignizing is a strategy that can be taken into consideration in the framework of an ethics of translation. As Venuti (in Baker 1998a) reports, Schleiermacher believed that a foreignizing strategy can signify the difference of the foreign text only by oppositional stance toward the domestic, challenging literary canons, professional standards, and ethical norms in the target language (242). Thus, the translator takes the risk of being criticized by reviewers who are sensitive to deviations from fluency (1994: 21). However, s/he also manages to present the Foreign as Foreign (Berman in Baker 1998a: 285-286). In a way Venuti (1992) seems to be trying to motivate translators not to produce a text that reads fluently and that gives the appearance that it is not translated (4). This he attempts to do by explaining not only intrinsic

but also extrinsic sources of motivation. For instance, he states that today translators do not have the opportunity to negotiate how much they are going to be paid for their job and implies that if translators were not invisible, they could get the right to negotiate, which is an idea that can obviously motivate translators extrinsically. I believe showing domestication of a source text as a form of violence can at least lead to critical thinking on the effect of using these strategies and may increase translators intrinsic motivation to let target texts include elements that reveal their foreignness. Therefore, it is possible to claim that Venuti and also Berman do not only express their own opinions related to this issue but they also try to persuade translators who are also among their readers so that they can bring a change to the ethics of translation. Although Berman (2000) seems to be prescriptive in the way he lists the methods that lead to bad translations, his negative analytic helps to see all those criticized methods together and understand not only the differences between them but also their effect on the translation as a product. It would certainly be more helpful to have a positive analytic as well, but Berman is also aware of the need for positive analytic and states that the negative analytic should be extended by a positive counterpart (2000: 286). In Bermans list, there are twelve methods that lead to naturalized translations, which do violence to the source text by erasing the sense of foreignness (Venuti 1998b: 5). Among these methods is expansion, which I would like to focus on here. Berman points out that expansion is the method when the translator produces a longer text than the original. When I translated the abstract of my MA thesis, which was originally written in English, into Turkish, I also produced a longer text than the source text. Because both were my own texts, I was not worried about it at all. My thesis advisor had told me that this kind of an expansion is what he almost always observes in the translations of the abstracts into Turkish. At the time, I had thought that this result was due to the differences between the two languages, as the educational concepts used in the thesis were those that originated from the Western world. However, as far as I have understood, Berman does not think that expansion depends on languages. For example, if the translator has to translate a text about microwave ovens in a target culture where there is not a word

for microwave oven, then isnt it very much possible that s/he will either define or explain what this word stands for even once in the text? I do not assert that the translator can only give the definition of the word or explain its meaning in such a case. On the contrary, I believe that there are various factors that may lead to lengthy target texts when compared with source texts. Do we really have the desire to translate because of unconscious forces that direct us towards deforming source texts (Berman in Venuti 2000: 286)? Can it be that we are trying to produce texts that will help us feel like authors (if we are not already) who have written the original texts? I believe Bermans and Venutis works can help translators to start questioning their own translation acts and the reasons lying behind the decisions they have given. This questioning can make translators more aware of the reasons for their decisions if nothing else. REFERENCES Berman, Antoine. 2000. Translation and the Trials of the Foreign. in Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. 284-298. Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 1994. The Translators Invisibility: the Evidence of reviews, In Other Words: Journal of the Translators Association. 4. 1622. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998a. Strategies of Translation. in Mona Baker, Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge. 240-244. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998b. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge.

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