Repository path: workshop/regimes/R08-resistancy.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R08 — resistancy (Venuti's foreignizing techniques, executed)

v1.0 (frozen 2026-07-28, S048.) The mirror of R07: an R06 with a numbered rule set frozen before translating and a coverage code on every logged decision. The rule set is assembled from Venuti's account of his own practice on Milo De Angelis and on Ezra Pound's "The Seafarer" — The Translator's Invisibility ch. 1 §II (pp. 34–36), ch. 6 §II (pp. 290–300), ch. 7 (pp. 310–311).

This regime is written in the knowledge that its own source says it cannot be written. Venuti: "The precise nature of this relationship cannot be calculated before the translation process is begun because different relationships must be worked out for the specific cultural materials of different foreign texts and for the specific cultural situations in which those texts are translated" (ch. 6, p. 296); and the techniques "more often than not […] surface accidentally as possibilities are tested, their effects evaluated only after the fact, when rationalization occurs" (ibid.). R08 exists to find out how much of a translation that claim actually covers. It is a test of the claim, not a rejection of it, and if the coverage comes back low the claim is confirmed by the project's own measurement rather than merely quoted.

Roles, human involvement

As R07. Lead translator, labeled subject, $0. Judge never the lead.

The rule set (frozen; cited by number in the log)

R1 — Reproduce the source's discontinuity. Where the source breaks a construction, breaks it in English too rather than repairing it. Fragments stand. R2 — Follow the source's clause order and period length as closely as English grammar allows, including where the result is harder to read than a re-ordering would be. R3 — Archaism is licensed where the source word is itself dated or literary, and also where a dated English word opens a meaning a current one closes. (Venuti's plagiary / confute, ch. 6 p. 299; Pound's aye, ’mid, bide, ch. 1 p. 35.) R4 — Keep polysemy open. Where the source admits two readings, prefer a rendering that admits two readings, even if neither maps exactly onto the source's pair. R5 — Do not supply what the source withholds. No subject, verb, connective, antecedent or explanatory phrase inserted for the reader's convenience. R6 — Calque where the source's figure is not English. Prefer a word-for-word rendering of an image or idiom to a domestic equivalent. R7 — Retain source-culture particulars unassimilated — names, institutions, measures, forms of address — without gloss. R8 — Mix registers where the source mixes them, and do not level the mixture toward a middle. R9 — Deviation must stop short of the parodic or the incomprehensible. (Venuti's own limit, ch. 7 p. 311: "perceptible deviations that may risk but stop short of the parodic or the incomprehensible.") R10 — Abusive fidelity is licensed: a rendering may exceed the source — sharpen, extend, or turn a critical thrust back on it — where doing so reproduces analogically an abuse the source performs on its own language.

R1, R2 and R5 come from Venuti's De Angelis practice (the omitted subject and verb in "came to mind"; "there was choosing"; adhering to line-breaks and fragments). R3 and R4 from "plagiary," "confute," and the archaism argument. R6–R8 generalise the "Seafarer" calques and the colloquial/philosophical mixture. R9 is his stated limit. R10 is Philip Lewis's term as Venuti adopts it.

Procedure

Identical to R07 §§1–8, with R07 substituted by R08 throughout, and one addition:

• §5a — Interpretive decisions are flagged. Where a decision was made on the basis of an interpretation of what the source means rather than by any rule, the log marks it INT in addition to its coverage code. Venuti's account of translating "L'idea centrale" makes interpretation the mechanism that decides where the rules do not (ch. 6 pp. 294–295: "This interpretation allowed me to solve certain translation problems even as it created others"). The flag is what lets the project count how much of the work interpretation is doing.

Outputs

As R07.

Known limitations (by design)

• Everything R07 lists, including that the translator scores its own coverage and that the rule set is this project's assembly rather than Venuti's text.
• R10 can absorb anything. A rule that licenses exceeding the source cannot be violated by any rendering the translator is willing to call analogically abusive. It is included because Venuti includes it, and it is named here as the reason the D-rate for R08 should be read as an upper bound: any site coded D under R10 alone would also have been codeable P.
• R9 is a limit, not a generator. It can veto; it cannot choose.
• The target-culture half of Venuti's theory is absent. Foreignization for Venuti is defined against a target-language situation — "a strategic construction whose value is contingent on the current target-language situation" (ch. 1 p. 20) — and a rule set that operates only on the source-to-target mapping cannot see that half. The regime is therefore a test of the discursive half of the strategy only, and any finding about specifiability is a finding about that half. This is the sharpest limitation of the two regimes and it is not repairable inside them.

Changelog

• 2026-07-28 v1.0 (frozen, S048) — created, with R07, for RS-20260728e-venuti-specifiability.