The Translator’s Invisibility

The consequences of this trade imbalance are diverse and farreaching. By routinely translating large numbers of the most varied English-language books, foreign publishers have exploited the global drift toward American political and economic hegemony in the postwar period, actively supporting the international expansion of Anglo-American culture. This trend has been reinforced by English-language book imports: the range of foreign countries receiving these books and the various categories into which the books fall show not only the worldwide reach of English, but the depth of its presence in foreign cultures, circulating through the school, the library, the bookstore, determining diverse areas, disciplines, and constituencies—academic and religious, literary and technical, elite and popular, adult and child (see Table 2). British and American publishing, in turn, has reaped the financial benefits of successfully imposing Anglo-American cultural values on a vast foreign readership, while producing cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States that are aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with English-language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other. The prevalence of fluent {16} domestication has supported these developments because of its economic value: enforced by editors, publishers, and reviewers, fluency results in translations that are eminently readable and therefore consumable on the book market, assisting in their commodification and insuring the neglect of foreign texts and English-language translation discourses that are more resistant to easy readability.

Table 2. US book exports to major countries, 1990: shipments valued at $2500 or more

(Source: Grannis 1991, pp. 21 and 22)

Country	($)
Canada	664,448
United Kingdom	171,391
Australia	106,274
Japan	87,562
Germany, West	42,244
Netherlands	33,715
Mexico	32,337
Singapore	31,321
France	20,144
India	17,576
Taiwan	15,304
Hong Kong	12,853
Brazil	12,451
South Africa	11,378
Philippines	10,560
Switzerland	9,854
Italy	9,799
Spain	9,687
New Zealand	9,600
Korea, South	8,245
Ireland	7,946
Sweden	6,597
Argentina	5,746
Finland	5,095
Venezuela	4,772
Israel	4,324
Denmark	4,012
Malaysia	3,998
Portugal	3,881

Type of book	($)
Dictionaries	4,659
Encyclopedias	39,369
Atlases	6,725
Textbooks	128,431
Bibtes & other religious	55,341
Technical, scientific, professional	322,647
Art & pictorial	12,242
Music	17,502
Children’s picture, coloring, drawing	42,875
Other hardbound	42,194
Rack-size paperbound	49,956
Other	736,063
Total	1,428,004

The translator’s invisibility can now be seen as a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the {17} multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated. An illusionism produced by fluent translating, the translator’s invisibility at once enacts and masks an insidious domestication of foreign texts, rewriting them in the transparent discourse that prevails in English and that selects precisely those foreign texts amenable to fluent translating. Insofar as the effect of transparency effaces the work of translation, it contributes to the cultural marginality and economic exploitation that English-language translators have long suffered, their status as seldom recognized, poorly paid writers whose work nonetheless remains indispensable because of the global domination of Anglo-American culture, of English. Behind the translator’s invisibility is a trade imbalance that underwrites this domination, but also decreases the cultural capital of foreign values in English by limiting the number of foreign texts translated and submitting them to domesticating revision. The translator’s invisibility is symptomatic of a complacency in Anglo-American relations with cultural others, a complacency that can be described—without too much exaggeration—as imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home.