Domesticating or foreignizing foreignization? Joyce translation as a test for Venuti’s theories

According to Lawrence Venuti (1995, 1998a, 1998b), practical approaches to literary translation can be subsumed under the mutually exclusive strategies of domestication (making the text familiar for the target reader) and foreignization (making, or leaving, the text unfamiliar for the target reader). The translator chooses between such strategies both at the pre-translation stage, when s/he chooses the text to submit to the publisher, and at the interlinguistic translation stage proper. Taking into consideration the second stage only, this paper aims at showing that, whereas it may be easy to assign most translations of mainstream literary genres to one of those two strategies, in the case of Ulysses this becomes much harder, because of the inherently foreignizing nature of the source text. As will be shown through practical examples from the Italian translation by Giulio de Angelis, in Ulysses translation macro-foreignization (i.e., retaining the sense of ‘foreignness’ inherent in the original) can at times only be achieved through micro-domestication (i.e., reconstructing language effects and external references in such a way that can they can be functionally retrieved by the target reader). Another partially domesticating option that may preserve the overall foreignizing function of the text, and will also be discussed here, is that of complementing the text with an explanatory paratext.