How Translations Function: Illusion and Disillusion

Abstract

Although Schleiermacher’s binary opposition has been present in Translation Studies for a long time, in some recent theoretical discussions, critics put emphasis on the way translations either represent or retransform the original rather than on whether they provide the actual access to ‘the foreign”. Translation has been, therefore, described in slightly different terms: of metaphor (substitution) in opposition to metonymy (contiguity) (Douglas 1991, Tymoczko 1999, Yao 2002, Hermans 2007, Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz 2013). This critical awareness does not reflect the way translations function in the culture, i.e. they are usually made and read as substitutes for their originals. As a consequence of that, a different distinction will be reminded and discussed, i.e. Jiří Levý’s illusionist and anti-illusionist methods of translating, placing Schleiermacher’s and Venuti’s “foreignizations” among the anti-illusionist practices.