A Quote by Lawrence Venuti

Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.

Lawrence Venuti

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Aggression Analysis Authorship Between Chooses Doing Favor First Foreign Form Havoc Imitation Languages Last Original Passive Play Process Receiving Second Translation Writer

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Lawrence Venuti
Born: February 9, 1953

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages

Dave Barry

Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.

Lawrence Venuti

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

Judith Butler

Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.

Alvaro Enrigue

I've had stuff of mine adapted by other people, so I've come to the conclusion that a movie is a different form from a novel and there is no such thing as a true adaptation. You have to adapt to this other thing and do it right. But that voice of the original should somehow still be there, and the original intent should still be there. So if the original writer saw the movie, the writer would say, "Well, that's not what I wrote, but that's what I meant." And if you can do that, I think you've done your job as a screenwriter.

Donald E. Westlake

There was writing and foreign languages. I always had an ease with foreign languages. So the both are related, both language related kind of mind.

Robert Greene

I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!

Caroline Lawrence

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

Peter Høeg

My childhood overseas instilled in me an appreciation for foreign languages and cultures, but also a deep understanding of the vital role of American leadership in confronting aggression abroad.

Gina Haspel

But foreign should not be defined in geographical terms. Then it would have no meaning except territorial or tribal patriotism. To me that alone is foreign which is foreign to truth, foreign to Atman.

Ram Swarup

In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.

George Henry Lewes

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

Judith Butler

Highly placed New York kingmakers work toward 'convergence' between the Republican and Democratic parties so as to preserve their 'America Last' foreign policy and eliminate foreign policy from political campaigns.

Phyllis Schlafly

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

Walter Benjamin

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

Joseph Brodsky

Hillary Clinton and her husband set up a private foundation called the Clinton Foundation. While she was secretary of state, the Clinton foundation accepted tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and foreign donors. Now y'all need to know out there, this is basic stuff, foreign donors and certainly foreign governments cannot participate in the American political process.

Mike Pence

A Quote by Lawrence Venuti

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