The Translator’s Invisibility

The concept of the translator’s “invisibility” is already a cultural critique, a diagnosis that opposes the situation it represents. It is partly a representation from below, from the standpoint of the contemporary English-language translator, although one who has been driven to question the conditions of his work because of various developments, cultural and social, foreign and domestic. The motive of this book is to make the translator more visible so as to resist and change the conditions under which translation is theorized and practiced today, especially in English-speaking countries. Hence, the first step will be to present a theoretical basis from which translations can be read as translations, as texts in their own right, permitting transparency to be demystified, seen as one discursive effect among others.

II

Translation is a process by which the chain of signifiers that constitutes the source-language text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the target language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation. Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially {18} endless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity (Derrida 1982). Both foreign text and translation are derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their intentions. As a result, a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in any one translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specific social situations, in different historical periods. Meaning is a plural and contingent relation, not an unchanging unified essence, and therefore a translation cannot be judged according to mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence. Appeals to the foreign text cannot finally adjudicate between competing translations in the absence of linguistic error, because canons of accuracy in translation, notions of “fidelity” and “freedom,” are historically determined categories. Even the notion of “linguistic error” is subject to variation, since mistranslations, especially in literary texts, can be not merely intelligible but significant in the target-language culture. The viability of a translation is established by its relationship to the cultural and social conditions under which it is produced and read.

This relationship points to the violence that resides in the very purpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist it in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language reader. This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but it necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities—and an exorbitant gain of other possibilities specific to the translating language. Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly selfconscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of {19} foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. Translation can be considered the communication of a foreign text, but it is always a communication limited by its address to a specific reading audience.

The violent effects of translation are felt at home as well as abroad. On the one hand, translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures, and hence it potentially figures in ethnic discrimination, geopolitical confrontations, colonialism, terrorism, war. On the other hand, translation enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of literary canons in the target-language culture, inscribing poetry and fiction, for example, with the various poetic and narrative discourses that compete for cultural dominance in the target language.