Foreignization

Venuti shows an example of how foreignization too can be part of a nationalist strategy that aids in the building up of a national culture. The example he gives is of Friedrich Schleiermacher the German translation theorist. He “viewed translation as an important practice in the Prussian nationalist movement: it could enrich the German language by developing an elite literature and thus enable German culture to realize its historical destiny of global domination” (99). Thus Schleiermacher’s decision to foreignize is motivated by similar feelings that Lamb had in his domesticating mission.

Schleiermacher believed that a translator should bring the target language reader to the source text by creating the same effect that the source text had on its readers. This would mean that the text retained its essential ‘foreignness’ even in translation. It might seem as if this is a respectful gesture towards foreign cultures and languages, but Venuti points out how it is essentially ethnocentric, or catering to the target language values. This is because, as Venuti puts it, the translation decides to preserve the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, “but only as it is perceived in the translation by a limited readership, an educated elite” (101). So the translation, even when it is foreignized, does not quite escape the cultural hierarchy of the target language. Foreignizing then becomes a very elitist strategy with only the educated class being able to recognize the foreignized elements of the translation. This was actually Schleiermacher’s agenda, that “an educated elite controls the formation of a national culture by refining its language through foreignizing translations” (102). He was pitching for an elite culture as against that of the middle and working classes.