Abstract
The domestication-foreignization paradigm of translator visibility originally
formulated by Lawrence Venuti has come to dominate much translation research.
However, much of the discussion relating to the use of this paradigm has historically
centred on the subjective nature of the terminology, or even the ideological
specificities of the American context in which Venuti produced the paradigm.
This article aims to demonstrate that a more fundamental issue with using the
visibility paradigm is a tendency to focus on textual analysis at the expense of broader
social and contextual details. Using textual analysis to explore the translation work of
Haruki Murakami, arguably one of the most visible contemporary translators, the
article demonstrates the often contradictory results that can arise from extrapolating
translator visibility in this way. It advocates further analysis of celebrity translators’
work for the production of a more sophisticated paradigm of translator visibility,
appropriate for a greater number of contexts.
