ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Lawrence Venuti

Lawrence Venuti is a person who likes to translate words from one language to another. When you talk or write in a particular language, it's called the "source language". But sometimes, people might not understand what you're saying if they don't know that language.

So, if Lawrence Venuti wants to help more people understand what you're saying, he might translate your words into a different language - this is called the "target language". Lawrence Venuti does this so that people who speak different languages can understand each other better.

But sometimes, Lawrence Venuti changes the words a little bit when he translates them. This might mean using words that are more familiar to the people who speak the target language or changing the sentence structure.

This can sometimes make people who speak the source language upset because they feel like the translation isn't exactly the same as what they said or wrote. But the goal of Lawrence Venuti's work is to help people understand each other better, even if they speak different languages.