Lawrence Venuti, scholar and expert on language translation, will give a virtual talk presented by Dickinson’s Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. “What is Translation? Theory, Practice, Value” will be held on Tuesday, March 23, at 7 p.m. in a public YouTube livestream. The link is available at the Clarke Forum website.
The presentation will explore the history of translation and the two approaches which dominate the field: instrumental and hermeneutic. Venuti will focus on these translation strategies as seen through the work of several theorists, translators and commentat¬¬¬ors stretching from antiquity to the present.
Venuti is a professor emeritus of English at Temple University. He is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French and Catalan. Venuti sits on the editorial and advisory boards of several journals, among them Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication and Translation Studies. His translations have achieved awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2008 Venuti’s version of Ernest Farrés’s book of poems, “Edward Hopper,” received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Most recently, Venuti is the author of “Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic,” and he is the editor of “The Translation Studies Reader.”