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Article published In:
Translation in times of technocapitalism
Edited by Stefan Baumgarten and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell
[Target 29:2] 2017
► pp. 222–243

Foucault in English

The politics of exoticization

| Universidade Nova de Lisboa

It is something of a cliché to affirm that translations into English are almost always domestications, privileging fluency and naturalness over fidelity to the source text. However, back in the 1970s, many of Michel Foucault’s major texts, which were introduced to the English-speaking public for the first time through Alan Sheridan Smith’s translations for Tavistock Publications, were not domesticated at all. Despite the fact that the originals are grounded in a non-empiricist theory of knowledge and use terms drawn from a universe of discourse that would have been completely alien in the English-speaking world, these translations closely follow the patterns of the French, with few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations. This paper analyses passages from Sheridan Smith’s English translations of Les Mots et les choses and L’Archéologie du savoir in order to discuss the long-term effects of this translation strategy. It then goes on to compare and assess two very different translations of Foucault’s lecture L’ Ordre du discours (1970), an early one by Rupert Swyer (1971), which brings the text to the English reader, and a later one by Ian McLeod (1981), which obliges the reader to go to the text. The paper concludes by reiterating the need for Anglophone academic culture to open up to foreign perspectives, and suggests, following Goethe (Book of West and East, 1819) that new epistemes are best introduced gradually in order to avoid alienating or confusing a public that might not be ready for them.

Keywords: Michel Foucault, English translation, French theory, continental philosophy, poststructuralism
Article outline
  • 1.Michel Foucault – A ‘difficult’ writer?
  • 2.The perils of foreignization
  • 3.Phased translation
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Addendum
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.29.2.02ben
References

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1975 Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
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2020. Foucault’sFolie et déraison: its influence and its contemporary relevance. History of Psychiatry 31:3 ► pp. 351 ff. DOI logo

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