Tuesday 20 November 2012

Lawrence Venuti at UCL, 13 December

Imperial College London's Translation Unit has a longstanding working relationship with the MA in Translation at UCL. UCL students can take one module at the MScTrans, either 'Language and Translation' or 'Translation Technology'.

UCL will be hosting Lawrence Venuti, professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia on 13 December, 6pm

The lecture is entitled
Genealogies of Translation Theory: Schleiermacher

Address:
Anatomy JZ Young Lecture Theatre (entrance opposite 131 Gower Street)
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT


The lecture contrasts instrumental and hermeneutic models of language and translation, and the translation commentary they generate. The instrumental model views translation as the reproduction of an invariant form, meaning or effect. The hermeneutic model treats translation as an interpretation of a source text that remains subject to transformation during translation. 

The analysis of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lecture “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813) which follows, suggests that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic approach to translation is pre-empted by a residual empiricism that detaches the interpretive act from its context while privileging the values of a cultural elite in the service of Prussian nationalism. 

The lecture argues that translation research and practice should replace empiricist-based instrumentalism with an understanding of translation that employs a more sophisticated version of the hermeneutic model. It conceives of translation as an interpretive act that potentially initiates a mutual interrogation – of the source text and culture and of the translation and its cultural situation. This approach is illustrated through a reading of Susan Bernofsky’s 2004 English translation of Schleiermacher’s lecture.

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