The colonial nature of Bible translations in the TEV / CEV mold

Lawrence Venuti, who gave the Eugene A. Nida lecture at SBL Boston last year, describes and practices a translation strategy he refers to as “resistancy.” Another term for the same: “estranging translation.” A goal of resistant translation is that of challenging the hegemony of English language culture insofar as it assimilates everything to itself and its technocratic goal of transparent texts.

Venuti deliberately muddles the waters with statements like this:

De Angelis’s poetry can still enlist the translator in a cultural contradiction: I was led to implement a resistant strategy in opposition to the discursive rules against which my work would most likely be judged, and yet that strategy, far from proving more faithful to the Italian texts, in fact abused them by exploiting their potential for different and incompatible meanings.

But these statements of principle are clear:

Resistancy makes English-language translation a dissident politics today . . . my translations resist the hegemony of transparent discourse in English-language culture . . . they do this from within . . .questioning its major cultural status by using it as a vehicle for ideas and discursive techniques which remain minor in it, which it excludes.

In contrast . . . placing a premium on transparency and a fluent strategy can be viewed as a cultural narcissism: it seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and finds only the same culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other.

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995) 304-306.

“Transparency” and “fluency” in this context refer to translation strategies which take meandering, repetitive, and, at the same time, elliptical and elusive discourse and restructure it into concise, punctuated, unambiguous prose.

The title of this post aims spit in the eyes of my friends over at Better Bibles, not to mention Eddie Arthur. It is my impression that, when it comes to Bible translation emanating from English-language culture, Venuti’s is a voice crying in the wilderness. It is no accident that Venuti in Boston began his lecture by distancing himself ever so explicitly from Nida whom the lecture was meant to honor. Nida is honored by Venuti’s frontal challenge to his theory of translation.

Comments

[Eddie]

'Wipes his eyes clear of spit with a rather surprised look on his face.'

Thanks for this post John; I rather like it.

I start from the theological point of view that Scripture is a vehicle of God's mission to humanity and as such it is meant to be understood. However, the notion of understanding is a complex one and has a fair bit of cultural baggage (which your post hints at).

Our experience in West Africa showed that to translate parables, for example, in a transparent fashion confused the meaning and made the speaker sound like a child. Against a good deal of resistance from some consultants, it has to be said, we insisted on 'meandering, repetitive, and, at the same time, elliptical and elusive discourse' remaining meandering, repetitive, elliptical and elusive. In a culture where this was the normal mode of discourse, this communicated meaning very clearly and delighted the ears of the readers. That being said, in a different context, we may well have adopted another approach. Horses for courses as my dad used to say.

In my experience of working with translators in Africa, challenging Nida is not at all rare. Perhaps Venuti needs to spend a bit more time in the physical wilderness rather than the metaphorical wilderness to discover this.

[JohnFH]

Eddie,

Thanks for catching the spirit of my post.

Right now I have visions of Venuti in the company of David Ker in Africa seeing how translation is done on the ground.

It would, I suspect, be an "estranging" experience, a chance for Venuti to put some flesh on the bones of his rhetoric.

[David Ker]

Could you maybe change that to "I spit in their general direction?"

This generation of Bible translations in Africa is being done by Africans. And I'm not always able to say whether their translation has domesticated the text due to the texts foreignness and also my own.

Who am I to argue with a guy named Venuti? His surname is twice as long as mine and sounds like something delicious.

But Hobbins I can argue with. Dissing the CEV! Shame on you!

[JohnFH]

David,

So long as those who are translating are translating from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, not the CEV, there is a chance, at least, that the translation work will not be infected by the technocratic ideal of a "transparent" text.

The reference to spit in the eyes was a very oblique reference to Mark 8:23. Can you see now?

[Eddie]

The CEV probably doesn't say spit in Mark....