Berman Bio * anything in orange are my own comments

• “Trials of the Foreign” originates out of German Romanticism – i.e. Schleiermacher
• Different methods of translation criticism like the plethora of different translation theories

The Trials of the Foreign

Page  19

• Heidegger – “Trial of the foreign” to explain Hölderlin’s last work
• It is the essence of every translation — showing the foreign (access to the, original, Word)
  1. 1st sense: establishes a relationship between the Self-Same and the Foreign (in utter foreignness)
  2. 2nd sense: trial for the Foreign, it is uprooted from SL to TL
• rationality = domestication
• violence = foreign

Why is the foreignization strategy seen as violent, while the domestication strategy seems rational?

• the intensifications, or strangeness in the TL —-bringing out anything that seems foreign in the SL & TL —-
  • How do you intensify the language – with diction, syntax?
  • Does the author need to be acquainted with what seems culturally foreign in one language to decide the foreignness of the TL?

• Foucault says two translations exist
  1. one with meaning, aesthetic value
  2. one that shoots the SL into the TL

• “literary” vs. “non-literary translation”
  • literary = broad sense, works
  • non-literary = technical, scientific, instrumental

The analytic of translation

• ‘negative analytic‘ — is concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hypertextual translations (pastiche–like parody but celebrates rather than mocks, imitation, adaptation, free writing), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised.
• Cartesian (senses) vs. psychoanalytic (conscious effort)

• Purpose of the analytic
  • used to find the forces that cause the translation to deviate from its essential aim!
    • those you get the deforming tendencies!
• ‘positive analytic‘ — a proposal for the type of translation required to render the foreign in the TT. Or “literal translation” – transforming the SL by ‘letters’
• ‘translatology’ — psychoanalysis-filled, translating what you want to based on repression and acknowledgement
• control of writing based on linguistic mass
• avoiding homogenization // keeping polysemy

12 Deforming Tendencies

1. Rationalization

• modification of syntactic structures including punctuation and sentence structure and order

2. Clarification

• includes explicitation which ‘aims to render “clear” what does not wish to be clear in the original”

3. Expansion

• reducing clarity of author’s voice with “overtranslation” = unshaping rhythm

4. Ennoblement

• this refers to the tendency on the part of certain translators to ‘improve’ on the original by rewriting it in a more elegant style

5. Qualitative impoverishment

• the replacement of words and expressions with TT equivalents ‘that lack their sonorous richness or, correspondingly, their signifying or “iconic” features’
• quality of words, what it sounds and looks like from ST to TT
• You’re taking away/flattening these descriptors, etc.
  • “What makes a word speak to us?”

6. Quantitative impoverishment

• loss of lexical variation in translation
• Reduce uniqueness of words
• loss of vocab density

7. The destruction of rhythms

• can be destroyed by deformation of word order and punctuation

8. The destruction of underlying networks of signification

• needs to be aware of network of words throughout texts
• associative network/logic

9. The destruction of linguistic patternings

• incoherence in TT, standardizing the TT

10. The destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization

• relates to local speech and language patterns which play an important role in establishing the setting of a novel

11. The destruction of expressions and idioms

• replacement of idiom or proverb by TL ‘equivalent’

12. The effacement of the superimposition of languages

• the way translation tends to erase traces of different forms of language that co-exist in the ST

 

Foreignization — translator deliberately keeping SL’s words into TT

Trial of Foreign — SL onto TL structure and format