University of Oregon

Review: Unequal Developments: Current Trends in Translation Studies Author(s): Lawrence Venuti Reviewed work(s): Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond by Gideon Toury Translation and Taboo by Douglas Robinson Culture in Transit: Translating the Literature of Qubec by Sherry Simon Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 360-368 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771537 Accessed: 11/10/2009 16:02
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REVIEWESSAY
LAWRENCE VENUTI

Unequal Developments: Current Trends in Translation Studies

AND DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION STUDIES BEYOND. Gideon Toury. Benjamins TranslaBy tion Library, Volume 5. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. vii, 311 p. AND TRANSLATION TABOO. Douglas Robinson. Dekalb, Il: Northern Illinois UniverBy sity Press, 1996. xix, 232 p. THE OFQUEBEC. IN TRANSLATING LITERATURE Edited by Sherry Simon. CULTURE TRANSIT: Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1995. 198 p. Although the growth of the discipline called "translation studies" has been described as a success story of the 1980s, the study of the history and theory of translation remains a backwater in the academy. Among the English-speaking countries, this is perhaps most true of the United States, where only a handful of graduate programs in translator training and translation research have been instituted, and foreign-language departments continue to assign greater priority to the study of literature (literary history, theory, and criticism) than to translating, whether literary or technical. Yet elsewhere as well, despite the recent proliferation of centers and programs throughout the world, translation studies can only be described as emergent, not quite a discipline in its own right (how many departments of translation studies can you name?), more an inter-discipline that straddles a range of fields depending on its particular institutional setting: linguistics, foreign languages, comparative literature, anthropology, among others. This fragmentation might suggest that translation research is pursued with a great deal of scholarly openness and resistance against rigidly compartmentalized thinking. But it has produced just the opposite effect. In fact, translation has failed to become an academic success because it is beset by a fragmentary array of theories, methodologies, and pedagogies, which, far from being commensurate, still submit to the institutional compartments of intellectual labor (now adjusted to admit translation). The prevalent theoretical approaches can be divided-loosely a linguistics-based orientation but without too much conceptual violence-into that aims to construct an empirical science of translation and an aesthetics-based orientation that emphasizes the cultural and political values implicit in the practice and study of translation (cf. Baker 1996). This theoretical division is reflected, for example, in Routledge's recent publishing in translation studies. In the early 1990s, these books were published in two different areas, each with its own commissioning editor, catalogue, and audience: "linguistics and language studies" and "literary and cultural studies." The potential market seemed so divided that Routledge cut back its translation studies series (whose general editors then left to initiate a similar series with Multilingual Matters Ltd). Currently, Routledge shrewdly aims to counter the fragmentation of the field by assigning the commissioning responsibilities to the linguistics editor who is pursuing more interdisciplinary projects. Yet this international trade publisher remains unique. In English, and no doubt in other languages, translation studies tend to be published by small presses, whether trade or university, for a limited, primarily academic readership, with most sales made to research libraries. Splin-

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tered into narrow constituencies by disciplinary boundaries, translation is hardly starting new trends in scholarly publishing or setting agendas in scholarly debate. The three books under review exemplify this current situation, offering an opportunity to assess the advances and limitations of the competing theoretical orientations. As a translator and student of translation, I can evaluate them only as an interested party, one who has found cultural studies a most productive approach, but who remains unwilling to abandon the archive and the collection of empirical data (how could studies be cultural without them?). My main interest in these books lies in their impact on the methodological fragmentation that characterizes translation research and keeps translation in the margins of cultural discourse, both in and out of the academy. The question that will most concern me, then, can be phrased as follows: Are the authors capable of bringing translation to the attention of a larger audience-larger, that is, than the relatively limited one for which each book was published? Gideon Toury's collection of theoretical papers and case studies presents concepts he has been developing since the late 1970s. His orientation is avowedly scientific, avoiding prescriptive accounts of translation to examine actual translation practices. He sets out from the assertion that "translations are facts of target cultures" (p. 29), the domestic situations where foreign texts are chosen for translation and discursive strategies are devised to translate them. And within that situation he emphasizes the "norms" that constrain the translator's activity (p. 53), the diverse values that shape translation decisions and that are themselves shaped by translations, or, more generally, by patterns of importing foreign forms and themes. Toury is less interested in the "adequacy" of a translation to the foreign text because he knows that "shifts" always occur between them, and in any case, a measurement of adequacy, even the identification of a "source" text, involves the usually implicit application of a domestic norm (pp. 56-7,74,84). His project is rather to describe and explain the domestic "acceptability" of a translation, the ways in which various shifts constitute a type of "equivalence" that conforms to domestic values at a certain historical moment (p. 61, 86). After formulating these theoretical concepts, Toury uses them to illuminate translations in the Hebrew literary tradition over the past century, analyzing the complicated network of constraints that figure in Hebrew versions of Shakespeare's sonnets and German children's literature, among other foreign texts. Throughout he helpfully addresses a host of secondary but related issues, like pseudotranslation (an original composition presented as a translation), indirect translation (translating a foreign literature from another culture's translations of it), and various research methodologies to study translations and the translating process (e.g. lexicography, questionnaires, "Thinking-Aloud Protocols"). There can be no doubt about the historical importance of Toury's work. With such other like-minded theorists as Itamar Even-Zohar, Andre Lefevere, and Jose Lambert, Toury helped to establish translation studies as a separate discipline by defining the object of study, the target text circulating in a "polysystem" of cultural norms and resources (for a survey of this group, see Gentzler chap. 5). Today Toury's target emphasis is shared by any scholar who would address translation in its own terms. His concepts and methods have in effect become basic guidelines (even when they aren't explicitly attributed to him) because they make a translation intelligible as a linguistic and cultural product. When studying translation you can't avoid comparing the foreign and translated texts, looking for shifts, inferring norms, even when you know that all these operations are no more than interpretations constrained by the domestic culture. Nonetheless, some two decades later, the limitations of Toury's project emerge more clearly. The claim of scientificity has come to seem theoretically naive or perhaps disingenuous. Toury feels that he must base translation research on a scientific model to establish translation studies as a legitimate discipline. "No empirical science can make a claim for completeness and (relative) autonomy unless it

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has a proper descriptivebranch,"he writes, and no translation scholars can be called "descriptive" unless "they refrain from value judgments in selecting subject matter or in presenting findings, and/or refuse to draw any conclusions in the form of recommendations for 'proper' behaviour" (pp. 1,2, his emphasis). Yet Toury is here repressing his own disciplinary interests. His project is motivated fundamentally by the effort to install translation studies in academic institutions. The target emphasis isn't merely necessary to conduct translation research; it is also implicated in academic empire-building, insofar as Toury imagines his audience to be scholars, not translators, and expects his theory to prevail over others. What's missing is a recognition that judgments can't be avoided in this or any other cultural theory. Even at the level of devising and executing a research project, a scholarly interpretation will be laden with the values of its cultural situation. Toury seems aware of this point, as when he suddenly encourages skepticism toward descriptions of norms: One thing to bear in mind, when setting out to study norm-governed behaviour, is that there is no necessary identity between the norms themselves and any formulation of them in language. Verbal formulations of course reflect awarenessof the existence of norms as well as of their respective significance. However, they also imply other interests, particularly a desire to control behaviour-i.e., to dictate norms rather than merely account for them. Normative formulations tend to be slanted, then, and should always be taken with a grain of salt. (p. 55, his emphases) The context of this passage suggests that Toury has in mind the accounts of translation norms given by the translators who followed (or violated) them. But there is no reason why that last sentence couldn't apply as well to a translation scholar formulating the norms that govern a body of translations (or Toury's desire to conceptualize translation studies and thereby control the behavior of translation scholars). The formulations are always interpretations, and they are made in relation to (and possibly against) previous formulations in the field, but also in relation to the hierarchy of values that define the culture at large. The very ability to perceive a value shaping a translation suggests a degree of critical detachment from it, not necessarily sympathetic identification. Toury, for instance, describes a Hebrew revision of Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man where the gender of the addressee is changed to female. And he explains this revision by noting that the translations were written in the early twentieth century for an audience of religious Jews for whom "love between two men [ . . . ] was simply out of bounds" (p. 118). Yet Toury's account, even if he doesn't brand the translation homophobic, is nonetheless distanced from homophobia and perhaps favorable in its description of same-sex relationships ("love between two men"). Moreover, since he refers to the translator's decision as a "compromise" that involved "voluntary censorship"(his emphasis), it seems clear that his formulation of the norm is slanted toward liberalism. If he shared the translator's conservatism, Toury might have called the translation a voluntary expression of moral propriety. The insistence on value-free translation studies prevents the discipline from being self-critical, from acknowledging and examining its dependence on other, related disciplines, from considering the wider cultural impact that translation research might have. Toury's method for descriptive research, setting out from comparative analyses of the foreign and translated texts to elucidate shifts and identify the target norms that motivate them-this method must still turn to cultural theory in order to assess the significance of the data, to analyze the norms. Norms may be in the first instance linguistic or literary, but they will also include a diverse range of domestic values, beliefs, and social representations that carry ideological force in serving the interests of specific groups. And they are always housed in social institutions. Scholars studying literary translations, for example, not only need to be knowledgeable about foreign and domestic literary traditions; they must also be

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equipped with a social theory of cultural value or taste to understand the constraints that are inscribed in translations. Over the past two decades, the claim of scientificity has effectively isolated translation studies from precisely the theoretical discourses that would enable scholars to draw incisive conclusions from their data while recognizing the constraints of their own cultural situation. The work of Even-Zohar and Toury, rooted in Russian Formalism, has ignored the radical changes that various theoretical developments have caused in literary and cultural the varieties of psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and studies-namely, poststructuralism on the current scene-all discourses that insist on the difficulty of separating fact from value in humanistic interpretation. Without them the translation theorist cannot begin to think about an ethics of translation, or the role played by translation in political movements, issues that seem more crucial today than sketching narrow disciplinary boundaries. Toury's new book would perpetuate the marginality of translation studies by discouraging an engagement with the trends and debates that fuel the most consequential thinking about culture. Douglas Robinson's book aims to provide just this sort of engagement. It offers sweeping speculative arguments designed to explain, evaluate, and alter the current state of translation theory and practice. He wants to radicalize translation by uncovering what keeps restraining theorists and practitioners in their approach to the foreign text, which he finds too deferential and conservative, too "repressive," too "obsessive" and "addicted," too "schizoid" (the theories that drive his speculations are drawn mostly from Freud, Lacan, and R.D. Laing; Julia Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves is conspicuously missing from this book). Like Toury, interestingly, Robinson intends to formulate translation norms. Yet where Toury presents himself as the taciturn scientist coolly inferring "regularities of behaviour" that establish predictable "laws" of translation (p. 16), Robinson presents himself as the raving mystic devising a translation theory that "strives not to convey stable information, not to replicate a normative experience, but to changethe reader-to change him or her in, perhaps, unpredictable ways" (pp. 41-2, his emphasis). Robinson argues that theorists and translators have harbored a taboo against translation dating back to the ancient mystery cults-the taboo of not translating this has clapped a set of mind-forged sacred texts for the noninitiate-and manacles on them, a fear of desecrating the foreign text. He locates the taboo in various ancient sources, offering provocative readings of Apuleius's The GoldenAss, Herodotus, and Plato (among others). Then he shows how the taboo survives in later traditions, notably Christian commentary on Bible translation (Jerome, Augustine, More) and German Romantic theory of literary translation (Schleiermacher, Benjamin). In Robinson's view, the survival takes the form of "rationalist" approaches to translation, which may be cast in different conceptual terms, but which are all trapped in binary oppositions: "source- or target-oriented, foreignized or domesticated, visible or invisible, good or bad" (p. xi). In using these terms he gathers a variety of contemporary translation theorists into his critique (among those explicitly mentioned are Eugene Nida, Even-Zohar, Toury, Katharina Reiss, Hans Vermeer, Antoine Berman, Tejaswini Niranjana). For millennia, says Robinson, rationalist theorists and practitioners have advocated either (a) "sense-for-sense" translating that hews to fluent discourses and evokes the illusion of transparency or (b) various "literalisms" that cultivate more resistant discourses to evoke the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text (p. xii). These approaches constitute a repression of "the body, the carnality of speech and, by extension, of writing as well" (p. 72), which is released only when the translator decides to dispense with rational control altogether: to translate, say, as blindly as the initiate experiences the mysteries, eyes closed in the dark; to transform the source text without a plan, without even a clue of what will come next, and also, inevitably, to be transformed by the experience of surrendering to mystical translation. (p. 44)

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For Robinson, translation is a cultural field in which to do battle against the rationalism that has dominated western civilization since antiquity. And the only effective weapon is the "mystical" use of language, which he illustrates not only by providing sample translations of his own, but by writing his book in a particular style: "I'm sticking with the anecdotal, the experiential, the excursional, the centrifugal," he asserts in his preface, describing his arguments as "more exploratory and digressive than syllogistic" (p. xvii). This prefatory statement is typical of a recurrent tic in Robinson's text, his repeated efforts to anticipate and preempt his critics. He seems to believe that his paean to irrationality will be curtly dismissed, "suffer[ing] various kinds of exclusion, ostracism, shunning" by the emergent discipline of translation studies, even the "foreignists" whom he sees "becoming a kind of elitist academic orthodoxy" (p. x). This seems rather paranoid for a translation scholar who has so far published five books on the topic, including a large anthology of translation theory, who speaks at so many international conferences, who contributes to so manyjournals, anthologies, and reference works-all related to the discipline. And obviously his latest book is addressed to the theorists he names and criticizes. At the beginning of the discussion, he portrays himself as the outsider, the lunatic fringe of translation studies, a John the Baptist wandering in the wilderness with a good message for pagan translators and theorists who don't want to hear it. At the end, however, his self-image abruptly shifts to the insider: "even in my harshest critiques of roof dogmatic 'foreignism'-I make no claim mantic translation theory-especially to stand outside what I attack, to exempt myself from those critiques" (p. 184). Is this sort of reversal what Robinson means by describing his arguments as "exploratory and digressive"? And exactly how is he able to free himself from the repression he diagnoses in himself and others? Once past the hectoring tone and the defensive posturing, the reader still has to confront the tendency of Robinson's speculation to collapse into self-contradiction. His main theme is an attack on "rationalist" translation theories for setting up binary oppositions. But isn't he just setting up another, more ancient binary: reason vs. madness? He definitely wants to expose a degree of unreason in reason-he he stops short of suggestcompares the rationalists to schizoid personalities-but ing that there can be reason in unreason. His refrain is that translators must abandon planning, control and method and "surrender schizophrenia, to confusion, to to the shifting tensions of in-betweenness" created by the task of translation (p. 159, his emphasis). His book is ultimately ajeremiad against the spirit/matter dualism that has long prevailed in western culture. But he doesn't so much displace as reinforce this dualism. Perhaps the most intriguing contradiction is the breach that rapidly opens between the style of the writing and the nature of the arguments. In privileging the personal anecdote and the self-absorbed digression, the tentative hypothesis over the dogmatic conclusion, Robinson aligns himself with recent trends in cultural commentary that reflect the postmodern distrust of the universal and the totalizing, especially as manifested in logic, teleology, the master narrative wherein all data and events are assembled under a governing principle. Paradoxically, however, teleology is what his speculation achieves. His master narrative is the triumph of western reason: whenever and wherever he looks in the history of translation theory, he finds repression and the residue of ancient prohibitions. The mystery cults become the Golden Age of translation, when the priest performed a mystical translation for the initiate, precipitating a change in the initiate's life, a conversion, "a blind irrational surrender to transformative experience" (p. 43). From this Eden we have fallen into the double life of rational translation, oscillating between the illusions of domesticating transparency and the risks of foreignizing resistance (which may itself be illusory). Robinson's investment in teleology is nowhere more visible than in his many references to his own books, which, through repeated citation, quotation and summary, he assembles into a lin-

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ear narrative of progressive enlightenment (see, for example, pp. 29-30). One effect of this totalizing tendency is extreme reductiveness. Not only do translation theories tend to become caricatures in Robinson's discussions, stripped of nuance, but both the theories and the discursive strategies they project tend to be universalized-in contradiction to the postmodern emphasis on the local, the particular. Thus, he reduces foreignizing translation to literalism, especially in referring to my ideas, whereas in fact I allow this sort of translation to take very different, even conflicting forms, not merely close, resistant renderings (his literalism), but also renderings that mix different cultural discourses, or even ones that are free and fluent (see Venuti 146-7, 271-2, 310). He misses the contingent variability of concepts like "domesticating" and "foreignizing," the fact that any definition of them depends on the specific cultural situation in which a translation is made. And he doesn't realize that this contingency involves a perpetual slippage of meaning that prevents the opposing concepts from being a static or even a true binary opposition-like body/soul. By the same token, he faults Niranjana's translation of a Kannada religious text for not being sufficiently "extreme" to challenge two previous colonialist versions: "If," he writes, "the echoes of Christian hymns in the first translation and of the romantic crisis-lyric in the second make them complicitous in colonization, the echoes of poststructuralist philosophy in [Niranjana'sl make it equally so" (p. 162). But since the appropriative movement that works in all translating can be redirected only by revising domestic forms of cultural appropriation, the shift from a Christian or romantic to a poststructuralist discourse in a translation is sufficient to register the difference of the Kannada text for a segment of current English-language readers (those for whom poststructuralism is still the quintessential theory of difference). In this sense, Niranjana's version can decisively challenge the colonial terms of the previous translations. Robinson characteristically anticipates his reductiveness in the preface, where he announces that he is "more a theorist than a historian" (p. xviii). He really isn't interested in the local, historically specific struggles in which translators have to engage. This is the materiality that he represses, the cultural and social conditions of the translated text, the translator's body. Or per.haps he is only interested in engaging in one struggle, a debate with other theorists, which remains firmly within the confines of the discipline, but which may well invite cultural theorists in the academy at large to think about translation (especially theorists who share his psychoanalytic approach). His analysis is most incisive, I think, when he focuses his theoretical speculation on an episode in the history of translation for which he presents some research. By drawing on Geoffrey Galt Harpham's account of Christian ascetism, for instance, Robinson illuminates the translation theories formulated by the Church fathers. This, however, doesn't do much to rectify his caricature of translators working today. His insistence that premeditation, the formulation of a plan before translating, dooms the translator to a repressive regime of rationalism betrays a lack of experience with actual translating. When a translator faces, say, a 200-page foreign text, any plan-whether it be assimilation to dominant domestic values or resistant evocation of linguistic and cultural differences-is always subject to on-going revision because it always encounters countless accidents and unanticipated problems. Every translator of an extended text experiences this serendipity of the translating process. A plan may establish the conceptual parameters within which problems emerge (and of course only certain problems will emerge within certain parameters). But planning can't predict specific solutions, nor the revisions that a particular text may force upon the translator's plan. For some translators (like me), a foreign text, deciding on more is at stake here: planning beforehand-selecting an overall strategy, marking out a range of domestic discourses, and imagining a are ways of showing respect for the foreign text and audomestic audience-these thor, for the foreign language and culture, ways of acknowledging that a domesti-

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cation will take place and the translator takes responsibility for its invasiveness, its revisionary power. Without showing this respect, translation is no more than exploitation, imperialism, a taking without giving anything back to the foreign text and culture. The least a translator can give is a plan, a new interpretation of the foreign text that enables it to live a different life in a different culture. Too often Robinson's sample translations seem like mere winging-it without concern for the foreign text or the domestic culture, or simply for his audience (see p. 45, for example, where he suddenly casts a passage from Apuleius into computer jargon). If this is mystical translating, then it will only restore the elitism of the ancient mystery cults, creating a minority of priestly translators and initiate readers (who actually want Apuleius in computerjargon?). Still, I find myself agreeing with Robinson on basic points. A sanctification of the foreign text has certainly stigmatized translation. Foreign-language academics, for example, who are in a position to teach and study translation, tend to discourage it because for them only foreign texts that are original compositions deserve study, and this must take place in the foreign language. In some cases, these academics have so sanctified the foreign text as to find most translations unacceptable. They tend to reduce translation to linguistic correctness, ignoring the cultural values that it can convey even if it contains errors (see, for example, the attack on the American translators of Thomas Mann's novels in Buck). I also agree with Robinson that one means of countering this sanctification is to encourage translation experimentalism, a writerly approach to translating that draws on the plurilingualism of every translating culture, using the literary, colloquial, technical Englishes that are mystified as "English." I just think that any experimentalism will be pointless unless the proliferation of discursive possibilities remains attuned to the differences of the foreign text in relation to domestic situations, particularly domestic literary traditions and canons of foreign literatures. It is only then that the translator can hope to effect changes in reading patterns and perhaps inspire new forms of writing. This is one of the lessons to be learned from Sherry Simon's exciting collection of documents by leading Canadian translators. Although the thirteen pieces display a rich generic variety (they include essays, journal excerpts, conference papers, interviews, a preface), the translators share a common project. For the past thirty years, they have been the main interpreters of Quebec literature to Englishspeaking countries starting with Canada. Every piece is shot through with the awareness that the translator works in this unique situation, rendering a minority language and literature: a French that is subordinate to American English and to Parisian French and a French literature that wears this subordination on its sleeve, cultivating a subversive literary language based on joual, Quebec working-class speech filled with gallicized English. Susanne Lotbiniere-Harwood began translating the Montr6al rock poet/singer Lucien Francoeur in the late 1970s, inspired by "a feeling of great responsibility about making Anglophone readers really understand Quebec" (p. 64). Her translating was both ethnographic and ideological, a nationalist celebration of Quebecois French, even if it initially seemed to her an into my second language, the 'colonizer's' lan"apparent defection-translating guage," hegemonic English (p. 63). The translators' project can't avoid being ideological because they seek to reproduce the cultural political agenda of contemporary Quebec writing. As Kathy Mezei points out, a Quebec author like Jacques Ferron or Michel Tremblay demonstrat"through language-joual, English colloquialisms or expressions-is ing the colonized, diglossic situation of Quebec" (p. 139). As a result, the translators develop various discursive strategies to signify, in an English translation, the Quebecois appropriation of English. "The problem was not just one of indicating the presence of English" in the French text, writes Betty Bednarski, "but of showing that English had undergone a change" (p. 112). In her version of Ferron's stories, she chose to retain certain gallicized English words: bosse,brecquefeste, clergimane(p.

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120). This concern with preserving the linguistic and cultural difference of the Quebecois text recurs throughout the documents. Ray Ellenwood "start[s] by assuming that I will do all I can not to assimilate the work too smoothly into English," a method that leads him to criticize the American translator Ralph Manheim for "find [ing] it necessary to normalize or perhaps internationalize the language" of Marie-Claire Blais's novel St. Lawrence Blues (pp. 106,105). Ellenwood sees his foreignizing method as a "moral obligation" (p. 109). To ask these Canadian translators and translation scholars not to respect the Qu6ebcois text, a la Robinson, or not to judge the English-centered norms that constrain the text and its translation, a la Toury, would effectively preempt their work, strip it of its raison d'etre. What Simon's collection makes clear is that their work can't be advanced or even conceptualized by Robinson's and Toury's theories (for Robinson, Bednarski seems to fall into the class of "schizophrenic translators" who overcome the schizoid personality of the rationalists: see pp. 158-9). The ideological dimension of the translations, even if sometimes formulated in sophisticated theoretical terms (Bakhtin and Berman are cited by a few contributors), doesn't stifle the translators' experimentalism, their ability to devise inventive solutions to translating dialect and stylistically innovative texts. Having a plan, in other words, doesn't prevent them from encountering the creative serendipity of translating. Here is Philip Stratford, the translator of the Acadian Antonine Maillet's fiction: To know what is coming next is the kiss of death for a reader. It interferes with the creative process too. While novelists and poets do not usually write completely blind, they do rely heavily on a sense of discovery, of advancing into the unknown as they pursue their subject and draw their readers along with them. The challenge for the translator [...] is to find ways to reproduce this excitement, this creative blindness, this sense of discovery, in the translation process. (p. 97) Stratford doesn't throw away his plan-the search for comparable English dialects to mimic Maillet's acadienismes-but rather comes up with "studied techniques" to stimulate chance invention: "avoid reading ahead," "never use a very good dictionary first time round," handwrite the first draft (pp. 97-8). It is also worth observing that the ideological dimension of Canadian translation doesn't stop the translators from being self-critical, from constantly re-evaluating their work in relation to their changing cultural and political situations. The nationalism that motivated Lotbiniere-Harwood's first project was subsequently revised by the feminist movement, which led her to translate the experimental lesbian writer Nicole Brossard. Luise von Flotow, after deciding to "translate only women's texts," encountered novels that undermined her "utopian belief in women's solidarity" by forcing her to confront historical and ethnic differences among Qu6bec women (pp. 32,40,44). Translating Quebec writing made Wayne Grady realize that the linguistic and cultural identity of English-speaking Canada is shaped by American and British translations of foreign literatures, particularly since the Canadian government funds only the translation of Canadian texts (p. 26). And Quebec writing, through its innovative resistance against American English and Parisian French, has encouraged the development of another minor language and literature through translation. The Scot William Findlay has successfully used Glaswegian working-class speech to render the joual dialogue in Tremblay's dramas, thereby challenging the British standard and especially the view that contemporary Scots "is but an inferior dialect of that 'greater' language and therefore incapable of ambitious imaginative expression" (p. 152). To be sure, the books by Toury, Robinson, and Simon don't represent every shade in the current spectrum of translation studies. But reading them can provide a provocative glimpse of some leading trends, along with the theoretical fragmentation that characterizes the field. I think only Simon's collection has a broad

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enough appeal to interest notjust diverse translators and translation theorists, but also scholars in other humanistic disciplines for whom the most urgent debates today hinge on the issue of linguistic and cultural identity. Canadian translators show that translation has much to contribute to these debates-but only when the translating and the translation research are deeply invested in local struggles and bent on preserving the foreignness of the foreign text. Temple University

Works Cited
Baker, Mona. "Linguistics and Cultural Studies: Complementary or Competing Paradigms in Translation Studies?" Ubersetzungswissenschaft im Umbrach. Fetschrift fur Wolfram Wilss zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. Angelika Lauer, Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast,Johann Haller, and Erich Steiner. Tiubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996. 9-19. Buck, Timothy. "Neither the Letter Nor the Spirit: Why Most English Translations of Thomas Mann Are So Inadequate." Times Literary Supplement. 13 Oct. 1995: 17. Gentzler, Edwin. Contemporary Translation Theories. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.