Violence In Translation: Venuti's Theory Applied To Yusuf Idris Translated Short Stories: Funeral Ceremony & Cheapest Nights

Abstract

The present study tackles violence in translation adopting Venuti’s (2009)theory of violence applied to some of Yusuf Idris’s translated short stories. These texts are translated by Wadida Wassef (1978) who skips some phrases in the ST due to her unacquaintance of the
ST culture. However, she does not paraphrase these untranslated phrases, as she cannot risk too much paraphrasing in her TT. It will be shown below that she sometimes leaves culturally loaded idioms and figures of speech untranslated, and in some other contexts, she fluctuates between ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in Venuti’s terms. Venuti’s main concern was in the culture of the ST (source text), and how it is honestly manifested in TT (translated or target text). His two main books, from which the theoretical framework of the present study was taken, are The Translator’s Invisibility (2009) where he introduced the idea of ‘violence’ in translation and compares it to ‘ethnocentric cleansing’ and the other book The Scandals of Translation, Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998). Culture represents a challenging obstacle for any translator (Anderson 2003). This makes translators, like Venuti, assert that ignoring the culture of ST during the process of translation is likened to ‘terrorism’ and ethnic discrimination. Some elicited examples of Wassef’s English translation for Idris’s short stories will be highlighted to see how far she is relatively ‘violent’ towards the culture of ST, and in some other times, she depicts the true cultural spirit of the Egyptian village. Some solutions will be offered by both Venuti and Nida to help translators to keep the cultural force of the ST.