The Translator’s Invisibility

Schleiermacher’s concept of foreignizing translation constitutes a resistance to dominant cultural values in German at the turn of the nineteenth century. The foreign in foreignizing translation then meant a specific selection of foreign texts (literary, philosophical, scholarly) and a development of discursive peculiarities that opposed both French cultural hegemony, especially among the aristocracy, and the literary discourses favored by the largest segment of readers, both middle- and working-class. Schleiermacher’s translation project depends on an idealist concept of literature that is at once elitist and nationalist, individualistic yet socially determinate, defined in opposition to capitalist economic practices: “the interpreter plies his trade in the field of commerce; the translator proper operates mainly in the fields of art and scholarship” (Lefevere 1977:68).

It is this ideological ensemble that must be jettisoned in any revival of foreignizing translation to intervene against the contemporary ascendancy of transparent discourse. Today, transparency is the dominant discourse in poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, bestsellers and print journalism. Even if the electronic media have weakened the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of print in the post-World War II period, the idealist concept of literature that underwrites that discourse continues to enjoys considerable institutional power, housed not only in the academy and in the literary cultures of various educated elites, but in the publishing industry and the mass-audience periodical press. The distinction that {117} Schleiermacher perceived between the field of commerce and the fields of art and scholarship has been eroded—if it ever existed as more than a fiction designed to consolidate literature as a transcendental cultural concept. Transparent discourse is eminently consumable in the contemporary cultural marketplace, which in turn influences publishing decisions to exclude foreign texts that preempt transparency.

Schleiermacher shows that the first opportunity to foreignize translation occurs in the choice of foreign text, wherein the translator can resist the dominant discourse in Anglo-American culture by restoring excluded texts and possibly reforming the canon of foreign literatures in English. Schleiermacher also suggests that foreignizing translation puts to work a specific discursive strategy. He opposes the foregrounding of the signified by which fluent translation produces the effect of transparency; for him a translation can be foreignized only by approximating the play of signifiers in the foreign text: “the more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original, the more foreign it will seem to the reader” (Lefevere 1977:78).

Schleiermacher’s lecture provides the tools for conceptualizing a revolt against the dominance of transparent discourse in current English-language translation. Yet the effects of this dominance have included, not only the widespread implementation of fluent strategies, but the marginalization of texts in the history of translation that can yield alternative theories and practices—like Schleiermacher’s lecture. With rare exceptions, English-language theorists and practitioners of English-language translation have neglected Schleiermacher. His lecture has been recognized as a key “modern” statement in translation theory only recently, and it was not translated into English until 1977.[6] And even its translator, André Lefevere, felt compelled to question Schleiermacher’s value: “his requirement that the translation should ‘give the feel’ of the source language must […] strike us increasingly as odd” (Lefevere 1977:67). Lefevere argued that translation should be domesticating, as “most theoreticians” recommended, and he specifically referred to Eugene Nida’s version of this theory, quoting Nida to criticize Schleiermacher:

In effect, we are faced here with a not-illogical and very spirited defence of what we know now as “translationese” or, with another phrase: “static equivalence,” and which is still very {118} much with us, in spite of the fact that most theoreticians would now subscribe to the concept of dynamic equivalence, which “aims at complete naturalness of expression and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture.”

(Lefevere 1981:11)[7]