Lawrence Venuti

Lawrence Venuti is a translator, mostly from Italian, as well as a translation theorist and historian. He is the author of "The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation" (1995) and "The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference" (1998) and the editor of "Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology" (1992) and "The Translation Studies Reader" (2000; 2nd edition, 2004). His most recent translations include Melissa P.'s fictionalized memoir "100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed" (2004), the anthology of short fiction "Italy: A Traveler's Literary Companion" (2003), and Antonia Pozzi's "Breath: Poems and Letters" (2002). He is currently professor of English at Temple University.

Abstract of presentation:

Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation

Intertextuality is central to the production and reception of translations. Yet the possibility of translating most foreign intertexts with any completeness or precision is so limited as to be virtually nonexistent. As a result, they
are usually replaced by analogous but ultimately different intertextual relations in the receiving language. The creation of a receiving intertext permits a translation to be read with comprehension by translating-language readers.
It also results in a disjunction between the foreign and translated texts, a proliferation of linguistic and cultural differences that are at once interpretive and interrogative.
Intertextuality enables and complicates translation, preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening the translated text to interpretive possibilities that vary with cultural constituencies in the receiving situation. To activate these possibilities and at the same time improve the study and practice of translation, we must work to theorize the relative autonomy of the translated
text and increase the self-consciousness of translators and readers of translations alike.