The Ethics of Literary Translation
Read the passage and answer the questions by choosing the best option.
The Ethics of Literary Translation
Translation is often described as a bridge between cultures, but the metaphor conceals a difficult truth: every bridge is built from one side first, and the direction of construction shapes the traffic that follows. When a novel is translated from a less widely spoken language into English, the translator faces a series of choices that are as much ethical as they are linguistic. Should culturally specific terms be domesticated — replaced with approximate English equivalents that read smoothly — or foreignised, left in their original form with a gloss, so that the reader is reminded they are entering unfamiliar territory? The domesticating approach risks erasing precisely the cultural distinctiveness that made the work worth translating; the foreignising approach risks making the text feel exotic or inaccessible. Neither strategy is neutral. The translator Lawrence Venuti has argued that the dominance of fluent, domesticating translation in English-language publishing reflects and reinforces a broader cultural asymmetry: English-speaking readers are encouraged to consume foreign literature as if it were written for them, while the labour of the translator — and the foreignness of the source — remains invisible.
1. The author uses the bridge metaphor to suggest that:
2. A 'domesticating' approach to translation means:
3. Venuti's criticism of fluent translation is that it: