Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
Interpretation
Translation alters the original text and can undermine the author's intent.
In this quote, Lawrence Venuti reflects on the complex nature of translation, suggesting that it is not merely a transfer of words from one language to another but rather a transformation that can lead to a distortion of the original author's ideas and voice. He warns that through the act of translating, the translator may assert their own authority, ultimately overshadowing the original work and its cultural nuances.
In practice
In a lecture on the impact of translation, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of preserving the original voice of authors.
Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
My visual landscape as a child was the inside of a lot of these old churches. And the Baroque drama of the things was what I was first engaging with artwise. I'm much more attracted to the aesthetic of religious iconography than the actual religious side. The passion and the blood and the violence and the gaudy side of it I find really fascinating.
Often, particularly towards the end of the process, I think of myself less as a theatre director and more as someone who just directs the traffic. My job is to move the ideas and bits of the show into the places where they work best. Sometimes my job is also to say, 'No.'
I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.
Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.
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