Making the 'Invisible' Visible? Reviewing Translated Works

Gray, Martyn

Abstract

In his 1995 seminal work, The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti examines the impact of the reviewing of translations on the (in)visibility of the translator. The American scholar contends that a fluent translation approach, which ultimately makes the work of the translator ‘invisible’ to the target reader, is the main criterion by which translations are read and assessed by reviewers; any deviations from such fluent discourse are dismissed as inadequate. The current monograph takes its inspiration from Venuti’s comments and subsequent studies of reviewing practices (see ‘Competition’ section below) and thus examines the criteria by which translations are assessed in the year 2015. One of the main aims of the monograph is therefore to either corroborate or contradict – or perhaps rather, update – Venuti’s assertions made more than twenty years ago. Yet the monograph is also original in its approach: firstly, it provides a cross-cultural insight into reviewing practices, assessing whether and how translations are reviewed differently in three Western European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Previous studies have been rather restrictive in their focus in this regard, investigating reviewing practices in just one country (principally the United Kingdom). Secondly, the monograph also affords us a cross-platform insight, examining how translations are reviewed depending on the popularity/specialisation of the platform on which the review is published. To achieve this, the monograph has three ‘points of attack’ for each country: popular corpora open for comments from the public, mainstream newspapers/cultural supplements, and specialised literary magazines. Although different platforms have different characteristics and readerships, previous studies of reviewing translated works have tended to focus exclusively on broadsheets (despite the fact that mainstream broadsheets only form a small part of the network of reviewing).

Citation

Gray, M. (2024). Making the 'Invisible' Visible? Reviewing Translated Works. Peter Lang Group

• Book Type: Authored Book
• Online Publication Date: Jul 9, 2024
• Publication Date: Jun 28, 2024
• Deposit Date: Feb 23, 2024
• Series Title: New Trends in Translation Studies
• ISBN: 9781803740300
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/31616757
• Contract Date: Feb 12, 2024