The Translator’s Invisibility

I want to suggest that insofar as foreignizing translation seeks to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation, it is highly desirable today, a strategic cultural intervention in the current state of world affairs, pitched against the hegemonic English-language nations and the unequal cultural exchanges in which they engage their global others. Foreignizing translation in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations. As a theory and practice of translation, however, a foreignizing method is specific to certain European countries at particular historical moments: formulated first in German culture during the classical and romantic periods, it has recently been revived in a French cultural scene characterized by postmodern developments in philosophy, literary {21} criticism, psychoanalysis, and social theory that have come to be known as “poststructuralism.”[10] Anglo-American culture, in contrast, has long been dominated by domesticating theories that recommend fluent translating. By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to English-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the very difference that translation is called on to convey. This ethnocentric violence is evident in the translation theories put forth by the prolific and influential Eugene Nida, translation consultant to the American Bible Society: here transparency is enlisted in the service of Christian humanism.

Consider Nida’s concept of “dynamic” or “functional equivalence” in translation, formulated first in 1964, but restated and developed in numerous books and articles over the past thirty years. “A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression,” states Nida, “and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture” (Nida 1964:159). The phrase “naturalness of expression” signals the importance of a fluent strategy to this theory of translation, and in Nida’s work it is obvious that fluency involves domestication. As he has recently put it, “the translator must be a person who can draw aside the curtains of linguistic and cultural differences so that people may see clearly the relevance of the original message” (Nida and de Waard 1986:14). This is of course a relevance to the target-language culture, something with which foreign writers are usually not concerned when they write their texts, so that relevance can be established in the translation process only by replacing source-language features that are not recognizable with target-language ones that are. Thus, when Nida asserts that “an easy and natural style in translating, despite the extreme difficulty of producing it […] is nevertheless essential to producing in the ultimate receptors a response similar to that of the original receptors” (Nida 1964:163), he is in fact imposing the English-language valorization of transparent discourse on every foreign culture, masking a basic disjunction between the source-and target-language texts which puts into question the possibility of eliciting a “similar” response.