One Size Fits All? Varieties of English and ELF in Translation

If, as Venuti (2005) states, more or less domesticating translation strategies ‘form national identities through a specular process in which the subject identifies with cultural materials that are defined as national and thereby enable a self-recognition in a national collective’, what is the position of native speakers of English when faced with target texts written in a variety of English that they do not recognize as their own or TTs that seek to betray no specific geographical provenance at all? Examining the language adopted in fiction translated into English, we can notice that there are several different behaviours and this paper sets out to trace some of the strategies adopted by publishing companies, with particular emphasis on British and American English, in the context of translation ‘into English’. The different strategies (books appearing in both markets in either British or American English, earlier British English translations being then ‘adapted’ for the American market, two different editions appearing simultaneously, etc.) will be illustrated with examples taken from Italian to English literary translation from over the last seventy years