Thank you for the interesting article. The issue is close to my heart, and I care for it deeply. The ethnocentric domestication you write about is not the end of the story, though. There is more to having to please the audience. It doesn't stop at nationality, culture, it includes also individual tastes, such as those of the clients, proofreaders, editors. Also, pour satisfaire les bourgeois, all sorts of perfectly all right grammar and syntax in the target language are str... See more Thank you for the interesting article. The issue is close to my heart, and I care for it deeply. The ethnocentric domestication you write about is not the end of the story, though. There is more to having to please the audience. It doesn't stop at nationality, culture, it includes also individual tastes, such as those of the clients, proofreaders, editors. Also, pour satisfaire les bourgeois, all sorts of perfectly all right grammar and syntax in the target language are streamlined into some kind of awful universalist 'plain language'. In fact, similar to the 'plain language' of some modern legal documents. Forget haute langue, forget expressive man-to-man talk. In fact, emphasis also is reduced, down to the standardest indicative that can be thought about. Just boring mainstream. Additional, domestication is sometimes enforced without really having a clue about the culture really. The depth of study sometimes doesn't even approach reading the Wikipedia article and googling for a while. Furthermore, I think this and the L1 rule (i.e. translators to translate only into native languages) are interconnected. Who cares about comprehension as long as it sounds cool and native. In fact, who cares about the quality of the target, either, as long as the translator could show the right passport. This said, I'm a fervent supporter of the idea of just talking to the client about whichever approach is going to be taken. After all, this is really the client's decision unless the client specifically wishes to rely on our choice in the matter. On the other hand, the masking of translation also has a different angle, not known in literary translation: the formatting hype. CATs have to sell, agencies and translators have to use additional services to sell basic services, and hence the mimicking of the exact look of the original document is a bit of an idol. That goes as far as copying not even logos but signatures from the source document and putting them on the target. Which is illegal, by the way.
[Edited at 2013-07-04 20:44 GMT] ▲ Collapse | |