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Umberto Eco: Domesticating vs. Modernizing

In the book, Experiences in translation, the author Umberto Eco dives deep into the various issues that occur within translation. Eco writes “The difference between modernizing the text and keeping it archaic is not the same as the one between foreignizing or domesticating it.” The difference that Eco mentions is what is actually being translated when it comes to the comparison of foreignizing and domesticating you are discussing the translation of the culture, while with modernizing versus archaic translations, you are discussing the translation of the text’s features. On one end you are translating to adapt to the culture and on the other end, you are translating to adapt to stylistic techniques and contemporary meanings.

To understand what Eco is saying, one must first understand the type of translations that are mentioned. When foreignizing a text, you are keeping the cultural context of the source text after translating it, even if it doesn’t have relevance in the country of the target text. On the other hand, domesticating a text is when you do adapt the text to the culture of the target language’s country. Modernizing a text is when you are transforming the source text by altering certain stylistic features and meanings to adapt to the contemporary time. When keeping a text archaic, you are maintaining the same stylistic features and meanings of the text when translating, instead of making it more contemporary.

Two examples that help demonstrate this difference can be found in the short story Salsicce and in the epic poem of Dante’s Inferno. At one point in the story Salsicce, the author is listing some of the things that make her Italian, writing “mangio un gelato da 1,80 euro con stracciatella”. Stracciatella is not an ice cream flavor that exists in America so in an English translation, it was translated as “chocolate chip”. This is an example of domesticating a text, the meaning is only changing to adapt to the culture of the target country. In Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno, we can find an example of modernizing a text. The first line of an Italian version mentions “ la citta dolente,”, then in an English translation done in 1867 by Longfellow he writes “the city dolent”, while in a translation done in 1980 by Mandelbaum, he translates it to “the suffering city,”. These are examples of modernizing texts because both English translators are adjusting the phrase to make sense in their time period; for example “the city dolent” would not be understood by today’s contemporary readers, while “the suffering city” would. Although ‘dolent’ and “suffering” don’t have the same exact meaning, Mandelbaum was able to keep the general mood of the phrase as he modernized it.

From the two examples of domesticating and modernizing, it is obvious that one is more concerned with culture and the other is more concerned with stylistic features and meanings. As Eco said, although both pairs of techniques are concerned with translating, their purposes are the main difference; when domesticating a text you are making it more relatable for a reader while modernizing a text is making it more understandable for the reader.