IN HIS SEMINAL BOOK on translation, The Translator's Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti posits an ethics of translation based on a binary he calls “domesticating vs. foreignizing.” In a domesticating translation, the translator “domesticates” the foreign text by aiming for a transparent, “invisible” translation, one the reader ideally never becomes aware of; the experience should be akin to that of reading a text that has been written in the target language originally, that has not emerged from a foreign context at all. In “foreignizing” translation, on the other hand, what Venuti calls the “ethnocentric violence” inherent in any act of translation is rendered visible; the reader is made aware through textual strategies and translation choices that the object at hand is a cultural “other.” Venuti advocates for the latter strategy not because through it the violence of translation is mitigated, but because through it that violence is acknowledged.

Theories of translation are loaded with binaries. In fact, Venuti builds his formulation on the basis of a binary put forth two centuries ago by the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who in 1813 gave a lecture on translation methods in which he claimed there were “only two.