Venuti’s Invisibility in the Institutional Field: The Case of Türkiye’s Directorate for EU Affairs

This study re-examines Lawrence Venuti's concept of translator invisibility by shifting its application from literary translation to the institutional field. While Venuti links invisibility to textual fluency, this study distinguishes this effect from the structural erasure of the translator as a professional subject. It argues that institutional invisibility is a structural necessity rather than a choice, stemming from organizational norms and the requirement for a unified institutional voice. Unlike their literary counterparts, institutional translators are rendered invisible by the very nature of production processes that anonymize their work, limit their decision-making authority, and obscure their individual contributions within complex workflows. Therefore, the study proposes a contextual adaptation of Venuti’s framework, suggesting that while textual invisibility remains a structural requirement, translatorial agency is renegotiated through “organizational visibility.” This framework suggests that translators assert their visibility not through stylistic resistance, but by exercising participatory agency to construct the institution’s linguistic infrastructure. To analyze these dynamics, the study draws on the Directorate for EU Affairs as an illustrative case.