Domestication or foreignisation – or internationalisation

When translating something, a novel or a thesaurus, there are also more general than translation strategies to consider and to choose, than those previously presented. In translation studies the two basic strategies are domestication (kotouttaminen) and foreignisation (vieraannuttaminen), which are in practice exclusive. Lindfors (2001) summarises the idea behind the basic strategies:

“Translating a text from one culture to another usually requires that a choice is first made between two basic strategies, domestication and foreignisation. Domestication means making the text recognizable and familiar and thus bringing the foreign culture closer to the reader in the target culture, while foreignization means the opposite, taking the reader over to the foreign culture and making him or her feel the cultural and linguistic differences. This choice between domestication and foreignization is linked to questions of ethics, too: should the translator be accountable to the source or target culture, and to what extent? If target-cultural conventions are followed in the translation process, the text will be readily acceptable in the target culture, but it will inevitably lose some of the characteristics that would have given it a foreign or even exotic feeling.” (Lindfors 2001, 6)

Translating is not a value-free action and choices are made at all the stages of the process: what to translate, to whom, how etc.

“Translation is often regarded with suspicion because it inevitably domesticates foreign texts, inscribing them with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies. This process of inscription operates at every stage in the production, circulation, and reception of the translation. It is initiated by the very choice of a foreign text to translate, always an exclusion of other foreign texts and literatures, which answers to particular domestic interests. It continues most forcefully in the development of a translation strategy that rewrites the foreign text in domestic dialects and discourses, always a choice of certain domestic values to the exclusion of others. And it is further complicated by the diverse forms in which the translation is published, reviewed, read, and taught, producing cultural and political effects that vary with different institutional contexts and social positions.” (Venuti 1998, 67)

Venuti (1995, 306) states, that translating should never aim to remove dissimilarities between different cultures entirely. According to him the routineness of fluent domestication has influenced the British and American cultures that are

“aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with English-language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in cultural other”.

When considering multilingual and multicultural thesauri the basic assumption is that the different language versions should work in their own linguistic-cultural surroundings, e.g. the English version of a thesaurus in England and the Finnish version in Finland, and also cross-culturally so, that e.g. a Finnish information seeker could make searches in an international database in Finnish and still retrieve in documents written in English and indexed in English by a British indexer. We can also easily imagine a situation, where an indexer would need a British concept in Finnish, such as when indexing a British-English book into a Finnish-Finnish catalogue. Needs and expectations for multilingual and –cultural thesaurus vary, as well as strategies to construct them. The problem is that the needs and expectations are not necessarily carefully considered nor clearly expressed, and what makes the situation even more challenging is that the cultural aspects are also not directly observable, and that is why we need a multi-dimensional perspective of culture as well as thesauri.

Hall (1982) has made an extension to the Iceberg Theory, in which he represents a third level, which sometimes lies above, and sometimes below the waterline. He termed the theory a ‘Triad of Culture’. In the Triad of Culture the three levels of culture are:

technical culture, formal culture and informal culture or out-of-awareness control. (See also Hall’s triad in figure 4 in chapter 3.1 On culture, language and meaning.)

Technical culture is communication “at the level of science, that which can be measured accurately, and has no meaning outside it”.

“Let us take the word ‘time’. ‘Time’ has a variety of meanings, depending on context and culture. Technical time, on the other hand, refers only to the technical understanding of the concept and can be broken down into its ‘isolates’ and analysed.

One of its basic isolates is a second, which we all have a feel for. However, very few would be able to define a second. A technical ‘second’ has no feeling but a clear unambiguous scientific definition (CED):

A second is the basic SI unit of time: the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of caesium-133.2.” (Ibid, 44.)

Formal culture is “no longer objective, but is part of an accepted way of doing things. It can, and indeed is, taught. This is the culture of traditions, rules, customs, procedures, and so on.” (Ibid, 45) With the third level, informal culture, “Hall means that there are no ‘rules’ as such. This form of culture is neither taught nor learned, but acquired informally and, even more importantly, ‘out-of-awareness’. (Ibid, 46) In social science thesaurus use, the communication occurs primarily at the technical and at the formal levels of culture, but the third level is also represent in the way we react to the words, since, as Ulrych (1992, 254) ³² points out, it is at the level of connotative meaning that we judge and react to words.

According to Katan (2004, 45)

“The idea of English as an international language and the use of a standardized international technical language are attempts at making both language and culture technical. The most extreme examples of this are the artificial or auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, which are culture-free. The fact that they are culture free may well account for their lack of success in practice.” (Ibid.)

In the context of thesaurus construction this means that there are not only two, but in practice three basic strategies: domestication, foreignisation - and internationalisation. When writing a fictional novel the author would hardly try to avoid using culture-bound words, but should this apply to thesaurus constructors in multilingual and –cultural thesauri? One example of a thesaurus that strives to be culturally neutral is the ELSST thesaurus.

“The ELSST thesaurus will be created from the current UKDA HASSET. This will involve reducing the present hierarchies so that all cultural and institutional specificity are removed.” (Miller & Matthews 2001)

A kind of a modern translation strategy is also “existential equivalence”, which Koskinen (2000) found as a typical strategy within a European Union context.

“One of the fundamental tasks of the Translation Service – ‘a service with a mission’, as the information brochure describes it – is to safeguard the ideal of equality between languages. Within the EU context the symbolic value of translation is high. --- profession, this state of affairs can be frustrating: they need to produce a monument, not a text, and have to find new motivation to act as a guardian rather than a

32 “These are “the culturally or socially determined value judgements that are implicit in the semantics of a word”. Cited here Katan 1999, 32. Original source= Ulrych, Margherita (1992), Translating Texts from Theory to Practice, Rapallo: Cideb editore.

communicator. This could perhaps be called ‘existential equivalence’, that is, all the language versions need to exist, any other features being rather irrelevant or at least subordinate.” (Ibid, 83)

“In spite of its obvious multilingual and multicultural nature, the Commission’s Translation Service has not paid much attention to the so-called ‘cultural turn’ that has taken place in translation studies during the 1990s. In practice, the translation policy aims at acultural communication. This is partly due to the need to draft some documents so that they are applicable in all member states, and it is therefore necessary to avoid culture-specific features. But more significant is the institutional attitude that does not encourage any degree of cultural adaptation, nor perceive translators as experts in intercultural communication. There is a clear, albeit unwritten, preference for surface-level similarity, assumedly guaranteering that the readers of the various translations all get the same message.” (Ibid, 85)

All translators make decisions between foreignisation and domestication translation strategies, although they are not necessarily aware of it (Ruokonen 2004, 63). It would be useful for translators to know how others have acted in similar situations and thus know the predominant translation norms. It would also be useful to know how domestication and foreignisation are considered in translation theories, because theories can give new perspectives to translation problems and offer models of how to solve them. (Ibid, 63) For example, directions for use of different devices are usually translated in accordance with target language norms. It might be useful to discuss, which texts are usually translated according to a foreignisation strategy and which according to a domestication strategy, as well as the reasoning of translating in a certain style and the consequences of the selected strategy. It could also be useful to study translations on the basis of foreignisation and domestication, since it could open new perspectives and help to evaluate predominant practices. (Ibid, 75)

In thesaurus construction literature and practice it could also be useful to discuss these two basic strategies – domestication and foreignisation - and the third type found in the studied thesaurus context, internationalisation, and their basic values and implications, which have not been discussed before. This has to do with the ethics of indexing, which is not an established topic within information science as ethics of translation is part of translation science.