Venuti's Visibility

Prefatory note (2010): The following is a slightly revised version of the article published in Target 8/2 (1996), pp. 165-177, with the original page breaks indicated in square brackets. Revisiting the text now, in 2010, I am a little surprised to note the extent to which it was read as being overly “sarcastic” (Munday 2001: 155), as poking fun merely for the sake of fun. At the time, in 1995-96, I sincerely appreciated Venuti’s work for the intellectual space it legitimized: I would have hoped that the last sentence of my article would carry significantly more weight than the opening gambit. Venuti was a lot more engaging than the technocratic would-be scientists of the day. I was certainly not trying to be sarcastic in any gratuitous sense – if I had, I would have had a field-day with Venuti’s decidedly retro triple-substantive titles, and the like – and I was seriously trying to make a few points about the sociology of translation. But we are not able to control the way we are read; readers see more beginnings than ends. So here is the text, more or less as it was.