From Alienation To Establish To The Ground While Reserving Differences Ethics Of Deconstruction: Lawrence Venuti Translation Studies, Translation

It is without doubt that Lawrence Venuti, professor of English at Temple University as well as a professional translator for the past fifteen years, is one of the most significant deconstructionist translation theorists as well as postcolonialist translation theorists. He constructs an ambitious system, an disseminative and differing structure whose inner part is full of oppositions and tensions. The extension of these oppositions and tensions to the outer part of the system generates the discourse which Venuti employs to investigate the social effects of translation.This dissertation collects representative concepts from Venuti's works as its focus, aiming both at uncovering the process of genesis of the oppositions and tensions and at motive force for which Venuti's translation theories move translation studies from periphery to the centre. This is the panorama of Venuti's translation theories.Lawrence Venuti employes poststructuralism, esp. deconstructionism, postcolonialism and cultural studies as his source of theories. He provides a thorough and critical examination of translation from the seventeenth century to the present day. This shows how fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English, and it interrogates the ethnocentric and imperialist cultural consequences of the domestic values that were simultaneously inscribed and masked in foreign texts during this period. In tracing the history of translation, Lawrence Venuti locates alternative translation theories and practices which make it possible to counter the strategy of fluency, aiming to communicate linguistic and cultural differences instead of removing them. He picks up domestication translation, a concept resembling logos, and sets up foreignization translation as it opposition. Venuti resorts to Derrida's deconstruction to argue for foreignization by deconstructing domestication. Then Venuti constructs his chain of foreignization by appropriating concepts from other theorists and by reconstructing and integrating them. In such a chain, foreignization translation changes accordingly into abusive fidelity, resistancy, remainder, minoritizing translation, ethics of difference and samesness, and ethics of location. Venuti is frank to say his knowledge about the ultimate concern of translation going like this: for a translation ethics grounded in such difference, the key issue is not simply a discursive strategy (fluent or resistant), but always its intention and effect as well -i.e., whether the translating realizes an aim to promote cultural innovation and change.To better understand the genesis of Venuti's discursive system, the present dissertation focuses on his deconstructionist strategy and its inner and outer system.The first chapter looks back into the trends of western translation studies, mainly focusing on two parts, i.e., linguistic-oriented approaches to translation and cultural turn and postcolonial turn in translation studies, on which a better understanding of Venuti's theoretical background can be based.The second chapter portraits who and what Lawrence Venuti is, aiming at tracing the theoretical sources he employs.The third chapter mainly studies the inner part of Venuti's deconstructionist translation discourse, trying to uncover how he put to work Derrida's deconstruction, namely, placing concepts of binary opposition in a self-contradictory dilemma. Based on introducing the translator's invisibility and symptomatic reading, Venuti begins to construct binary opposition by appropriating"foreignizing and domesticating"from Schleiermacher. Thereafter, he advocates foreignizing by resorting to abusive fidelity and resistancy. This is the inner part of Venuti's theory, which is full of tensions.The fourth chapter studies the outer part of Venuti's theory by analyzing the discursive strategies he uses to investigate the social effect translation can have. Translation remains on the margins of society. Stigmatized as a form of authorship, discouraged by copyright law, depreciated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations. Venuti names these as the"scandals of translation". Then he resorts to minoritizing translation, argues for releasing"remainder"of language. To put to work these strategies could form cultural identities both for source-language culture and target-language culture. If translation has such far-reaching social effects, if in forming cultural identities it contributes to social reproduction and change, it seems important to evaluate these effects, to ask whether they are good or bad, or whether the resulting identities are ethical. Venuti builds anther pair of binary opposition: ethics of difference and ethics of sameness. The outer part of Venuti's discourse system ends with"ethics of location"by resorting again to Derrida's deconstruction.The approach of the present dissertation is in coincidence with"deconstruction", holding that Venuti advances current thinking about inequalities of translation and promotes the progress translation studies moves from the periphery to the centre of academy.