Wooden

 "We should instead examine the cultural and social conditions of the translation, considering whether its interpretants initiate an event, creating new knowledges and values by supplying a lack that they indicate in those that are currently dominant in the receiving situation. The lack may be an interpretant that a poet’s version can or cannot supply, for instance, a concept of equivalence that involves a semantic correspondence or even close adherence to the source text. The most authoritative and widely circulated translations may themselves not apply such an interpretant, or, if they do, a new edition of the source text or a new, independently articulated interpretation of it may require that the concept of equivalence applied in previous translations be revised in a retranslation (cf. chapter 5). Nonetheless, no interpretant can be regarded as inherently valuable, apart from its situation in a specific culture at a specific historical moment."

Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything : Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=1101392.
Created from ku on 2025-08-25 21:11:33.

 

What is it about this writing style?  It aims to be careful in definitions, but it ends up being confusing and a bit wooden. I guess what he's saying is that a translation should alter the target language / culture by supplying something previously missing. The one example he supplies is confusing, since "semantic correspondence" is the definition of translation itself. 

The style can alert the reader that something is amiss in the thinking itself. Why be so ponderous if your point is actually a valid one?