The Translator’s Invisibility

Rabassa’s translation is a triumph of fluent, gravid momentum, all stylishness and commonsensical virtuosity.

(West 1970:4)

His first four books published in English did not speak with the stunning lyrical precision of this one (the invisible translator is Michael Henry Heim).

(Michener 1980:108)

Helen Lane’s translation of the title of this book is faithful to Mario Vargas Llosa’s—“Elogio de la Madrastra”—but not quite idiomatic.

(Burgess 1990:11)

The Samurai, a transparent roman à clef, fluently translated by Barbara Bray, chronicles Ms Kristeva’s—and Paris’s—intellectual glory days.

(Steiner 1992:9)

In Stuart Hood’s translation, which flows crisply despite its occasionally disconcerting British accent, Mr Celati’s keen sense of language is rendered with precision.

(Dickstein 1992:18)

Often wooden, occasionally careless or inaccurate, it shows all the signs of hurried work and inadequate revision. […] The Spanish original here is 10 words shorter and incomparably more elegant.

(Balderston 1992:15)

The critical lexicon of post-World War II literary journalism is filled with so many terms to indicate the presence or absence of a fluent translation discourse: “crisp,” “elegant,” “flows,” “gracefully,” {4} “wooden.” There is even a group of pejorative neologisms designed to criticize translations that lack fluency, but also used, more generally, to signify badly written prose: “translatese,” “translationese,” “translatorese.” In English, fluent translation is recommended for an extremely wide range of foreign texts—contemporary and archaic, religious and scientific, fiction and nonfiction.

Translationese in a version from Hebrew is not always easy to detect, since the idioms have been familiarised through the Authorized Version.

(Times Literary Supplement 1961:iv)

An attempt has been made to use modern English which is lively without being slangy. Above all, an effort has been made to avoid the kind of unthinking “translationese” which has so often in the past imparted to translated Russian literature a distinctive, somehow “doughy,” style of its own with little relation to anything present in the original Russian.

(Hingley 1964:x)

He is solemnly reverential and, to give the thing an authentic classical smack, has couched it in the lukewarm translatese of one of his own more unurgent renderings.

(Corke 1967:761)

There is even a recognizable variant of pidgin English known as “translatorese” (“transjargonisation” being an American term for a particular form of it).

(Times Literary Supplement 1967:399)

Paralysing woodenness (“I am concerned to determine”), the dull thud of translatese (“Here is the place to mention Pirandello finally”) are often the price we more or less willingly pay for access to great thoughts.

(Brady 1977:201)