The Translator’s Invisibility

A gathering of such excerpts indicates which discursive features produce fluency in an English-language translation and which do not.

A fluent translation is written in English that is current (“modern”) instead of archaic, that is widely used instead of specialized (“jargonisation”), and that is standard instead of colloquial (“slangy”). {5} Foreign words (“pidgin”) are avoided, as are Britishisms in American translations and Americanisms in British translations. Fluency also depends on syntax that is not so “faithful” to the foreign text as to be “not quite idiomatic,” that unfolds continuously and easily (not “doughy”) to insure semantic “precision” with some rhythmic definition, a sense of closure (not a “dull thud”). A fluent translation is immediately recognizable and intelligible, “familiarised,” domesticated, not “disconcerting[ly]” foreign, capable of giving the reader unobstructed “access to great thoughts,” to what is “present in the original.” Under the regime of fluent translating, the translator works to make his or her work “invisible,” producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems “natural,” i.e., not translated.

The dominance of transparency in English-language translation reflects comparable trends in other cultural forms, including other forms of writing. The enormous economic and political power acquired by scientific research during the twentieth century, the postwar innovations in advanced communications technologies to expand the advertising and entertainment industries and support the economic cycle of commodity production and exchange—these developments have affected every medium, both print and electronic, by valorizing a purely instrumental use of language and other means of representation and thus emphasizing immediate intelligibility and the appearance of factuality.[1] The American poet Charles Bernstein, who for many years worked as a “commercial writer” of various kinds of nonfiction—medical, scientific, technical—observes how the dominance of transparency in contemporary writing is enforced by its economic value, which sets up acceptable “limits” for deviation:

the fact that the overwhelming majority of steady paid employment for writing involves using the authoritative plain styles, if it is not explicitly advertising; involves writing, that is, filled with preclusions, is a measure of why this is not simply a matter of stylistic choice but of social governance: we are not free to choose the language of the workplace or of the family we are born into, though we are free, within limits, to rebel against it.

(Bernstein 1986:225)

The authority of “plain styles” in English-language writing was of course achieved over several centuries, what Bernstein describes as {6} “the historical movement toward uniform spelling and grammar, with an ideology that emphasizes nonidiosyncratic, smooth transition, elimination of awkwardness, &c.—anything that might concentrate attention on the language itself” (ibid.:27). In contemporary Anglo-American literature, this movement has made realism the most prevalent form of narrative and free, prose-like verse the most prevalent form of poetry:

in contrast to, say, Sterne’s work, where the look & texture—the opacity—of the text is everywhere present, a neutral transparent prose style has developed in certain novels where the words seem meant to be looked through—to the depicted world beyond the page. Likewise, in current middle of the road poetry, we see the elimination of overt rhyme & alliteration, with metric forms retained primarily for their capacity to officialize as “poetry.”

(ibid.)[2]