Antoine Berman


Antoine Berman was a French translator, philosopher, historian and theorist of translation.

Life

Antoine Berman was born in the small town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, near Limoges, to a Polish-Jewish father and a French-Yugoslav mother. After living in hiding during the Second World War, the family settled near Paris. Berman attended the Lycée Montmorency. Later he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, where he met his wife Isabelle. In 1968, they moved to Argentina where they remained for five years. On their return to Paris, Berman directed a research program and taught several seminars at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, and published his major theoretical work, L'Epreuve de l'étranger in 1984. He died in 1991, at age 49, writing his last book in bed.

Work

Antoine Berman's "trials of the foreign", which originates from German Romanticism, tries to show the "deforming tendencies" inherent in the act of translation.
Berman's 'twelve deforming tendencies' in translation were:
  • Rationalisation
  • Clarification
  • Expansion
  • Ennoblement
  • Qualitative impoverishment
  • Quantitative impoverishment
  • The destruction of rhythms
  • The destruction of underlying networks of signification
  • The destruction of linguistic patternings
  • The destruction of vernacular network or their exoticisation
  • The destruction of expressions and idioms
  • The effacement of the superimposition of languages
Lawrence Venuti, an American translation theorist, has used Berman's concepts to write a genealogy of translation in an Anglo-American context to introduce the "foreignizing" strategy that is normatively suppressed in mainstream translation.

Influence

Berman was active in philosophical and literary circles, nevertheless he has been influential in translatology, especially in translation criticism. He claimed that there may be many different methods for translation criticism as there are many translation theories; therefore he entitled a model of his own as an analytical path, which can be modulated according to the specific objectives of each analyst and adapted to all standardized text types.

Books