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In his Translation and the Trials of The Foreign
(1985), Antoine Berman criticizes the strategy of
"naturalization," i.e. bringing the translated text as close as
possible to the receiving culture.
The properly ethical aim of the translating
act is receiving the foreign as foreign.
Berman's "negative analytic"
studies the system of textual deformation in translation, which
"naturalizes" the text into the receiving culture at the expense of
its "foreign" qualities.
The negative analytic is primarily
concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hyper-textual
translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free writing), where the play
of deforming forces is freely exercised.
If
one of the principal problems of poetic translation is to respect the polysemy
of the poem, then the principal problem of translating the novel is to respect
its shapeless polylogic and avoid an arbitrary homogenisation.
Berman’s
proposal for counterbalancing the deforming tendencies is the translation which
preserves the foreign in the target text. He designated it as “literal
translation:”
Here
‘literal’ means: attached to the letter (of works). Labor on the
letter in translation is more originary than restitution of meaning. It is
through this labor that translation, on the one hand, restores the particular
signifying process of works (which is more than their meaning) and, on the
other hand, transforms the translating language.
Antoine Berman, "La traduction comme epreuve de l'etranger," [Translation and the trials
of the foreign] Texte 4 (1985): 67-81.
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