The Translator’s Invisibility

The translator aims to preserve the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, but only as it is perceived in the translation by a limited readership, an educated elite. This means, first, that translation is always ethnocentric: even when a translated text contains discursive peculiarities designed to imitate a foreign text, even when the translation seems, in Schleiermacher’s (English translator’s) words, “bent towards a foreign likeness” (78–79; “zu einer fremden Aehnlichkeit hinübergebogen” (227)), it never escapes the hierarchy of cultural values inscribed in the target language. These values mediate {102} every move in the translation and every target-language reader’s response to it, including the perception of what is domestic or foreign: André Lefevere’s English version—“bent toward a foreign likeness”— domesticates Schleiermacher’s German by submitting its syntax to the dominant fluent strategy, whereas “toward a foreign likeness bent,” a discursive peculiarity that resists fluency by marking the English translation as archaic for the contemporary Anglo-American reader, foreignizes English by bending it toward the German syntax.

Interestingly, to imitate the German this closely is not to be more faithful to it, but to be more English, that is, consistent with an English syntactical inversion that is now archaic.

Schleiermacher’s theory anticipates these observations. He was keenly aware that translation strategies are situated in specific cultural formations where discourses are canonized or marginalized, circulating in relations of domination and exclusion. Thus, the translation method that cultivates discursive peculiarities to imitate the foreignness of the foreign text “cannot thrive equally well in all languages, but only in those which are not the captives of too strict a bond of classical expression outside of which all is reprehensible”; the ideal site for this method is “languages which are freer, in which innovations and deviations are tolerated to a greater extent, in such a way that their accumulation may, under certain circumstances, generate a certain characteristic mode of expression” (79–80). This linguistic and cultural freedom is complexly determined: not only is it defined against the “bonded languages” of other national cultures, but the “innovations and deviations” of foreignizing translation are defined against the norm set by other translation discourses in the target-language culture. And since Schleiermacher’s advocacy of the foreignizing method was also an advocacy of discourses specific to an educated elite, he was investing this limited social group with considerable cultural authority, going so far as to assign it a precise social function—to “generate a certain characteristic mode of expression,” developing a national language, “influencing the whole evolution of a culture” (80–81; “die gesammte Geistesentwikkelung” (231)). Here it becomes clear that Schleiermacher was enlisting his privileged translation method in a cultural political agenda: an educated elite controls the formation of a national culture by refining its language through foreignizing translations.

Schleiermacher’s lecture permits a much more detailed social and historical specification of this agenda. He concludes with {103} some explicit references to “we Germans,” remarking that “our nation,” “because of its respect for what is foreign and its mediating nature” (88; “seiner vermittelnden Natur” (243)), uniquely satisfies the “two conditions” necessary for foreignizing translation to thrive, namely “that understanding foreign works should be a thing known and desired and that the native language should be allowed a certain flexibility” (81). This is the understanding of foreign works sought by educated “Germans” like Schleiermacher, a university professor and minister in the Reformed church, who feels that the German language possesses the “flexibility” to support foreignizing translation since it is undeveloped, lacking a definite “mode of expression,” not yet “bonded” to the “classical,” a “partial mother tongue”: “our language, because we exercise it less owing to our Nordic sluggishness, can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only through the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign” (88). Since the category “foreign” here is determined by the educated, Schleiermacher is using translation to mark out a dominant space for a bourgeois minority in early nineteenth-century German culture.

As Albert Ward observes of this period,