The Translator's Invisibility

A History of Translation

Lawrence Venuti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351581028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Since publication over twenty years ago, The Translator's Invisibility has provoked debate and controversy within the field of translation and become a classic text. Providing a fascinating account of the history of translation from the seventeenth century to the present day, Venuti shows how fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English and investigates the cultural consequences of the receptor values which were simultaneously inscribed and masked in foreign texts during this period. Reissued with a new introduction, in which the author provides a clear, detailed account of key concepts and arguments in order to issue a counterblast against simplistic interpretations, The Translator's Invisibility takes its well-deserved place as part of the Routledge Translation Classics series. This book is essential reading for students of translation studies at all levels.

Chapter 1
Invisibility

I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections – scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.

Norman Shapiro

1 The regime of fluency

“Invisibility” is the term I will use to describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary British and American cultures. It refers to at least two mutually determining phenomena: one is an illusionistic effect of discourse, of the translator’s own manipulation of the translating language, English in this case; the other is the practice of reading and evaluating translations that has long prevailed in the United Kingdom and the United States, among other cultures, both Anglophone and foreign-language. A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text – the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” The illusion of transparency is an effect of a fluent translation strategy, of the translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. But readers also play a significant role in insuring that this illusory effect occurs because of the general tendency to read translations mainly for meaning, to reduce the stylistic features of the translation to the foreign text or writer, and to question any language use that might interfere with the seemingly untroubled communication of the foreign writer’s intention. What is so remarkable here is that the effect of transparency conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator’s crucial intervention. The more fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text.

The dominance of fluency in English-language translation becomes apparent in a sampling of reviews from newspapers and periodicals. On those rare occasions when reviewers address the translation at all, their brief comments usually focus on its style, neglecting such other possible questions as its accuracy, its intended audience, its economic value in the current book market, its relation to literary trends in English, its place in the translator’s career. And over the past sixty years the comments have grown amazingly consistent in praising fluency while damning deviations from it, even when the most diverse range of foreign texts is considered.

Take fiction, for instance, the most translated genre worldwide. Limit the choices to European and Latin American writers, the most translated into English, and pick examples with different kinds of narratives – novels and short stories, realistic and fantastic, lyrical and philosophical, psychological and political. Here is one possible list: Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1946), Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1955), Heinrich Böll’s Absent Without Leave (1965), Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1968), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother (1990), Gianni Celati’s Appearances (1992), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s A Russian Doll (1992), Ana Maria Moix’s Dangerous Virtues (1997), Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles (2000), Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2001), José Saramago’s The Double (2004), and Ismail Kadare’s The Successor (2005). Some of these translations enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success in English; others made an initial splash, then sank into oblivion; still others passed with little or no notice. Yet in the reviews they were all judged by the same criterion: fluency. The following selection of excerpts comes from various British and American periodicals, both literary and mass-audience; some were written by noted critics, novelists, and reviewers:

It is not easy, in translating French, to render qualities of sharpness or vividness, but the prose of Mr. Gilbert is always natural, brilliant, and crisp.

(Wilson 1946: 100)

The style is elegant, the prose lovely, and the translation excellent.

(New Republic 1955: 46)

In Absent Without Leave, a novella gracefully if not always flawlessly translated by Leila Vennewitz, Böll continues his stern and sometimes merciless probing of the conscience, values, and imperfections of his countrymen.

(Potoker 1965: 42)

The translation is a pleasantly fluent one: two chapters of it have already appeared in Playboy magazine.

(Times Literary Supplement 1969: 180)

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)

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

(Dickstein 1992: 13)

Often wooden, occasionally careless or inaccurate, it shows all the signs of hurried work and inadequate revision.

(Balderston 1992: 15)

Moix’s language, seamlessly translated by Margaret E. W. Jones, invites the reader to teeter on the emotional precipices of the hostess’s mental landscape.

(Gaffney 1997: 7)

The translation by Frank Wynne is fluent and natural-sounding, though I notice that Wynne has now and then clouded the clarity of the cranky ideas.

(Berman 2000: 28)

Translated with fluid grace by Erdag M. Goknor, the novel is set in the 16th century.

(Eder 2001: 7)

The novel’s translation from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa breezes right along.

(Cobb 2004: 32)

Even in this clunky translation (from the French as opposed to the original Albanian), Kadare stands with Orwell, Kafka, Kundera and Solzhenitsyn as a major chronicler of oppression.

(Publishers Weekly 2005: 43)

The critical lexicon of literary journalism since World War II is filled with so many terms to indicate the presence or absence of a fluent translation strategy: “crisp,” “elegant,” “flows,” “gracefully,” “wooden,” “seamlessly,” “fluid,” “clunky.” 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 luke-warm 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)

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”). Foreign words or English words and phrases imprinted by a foreign language (“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 (“breezes right along” instead of being “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,” that is, not translated.

The dominance of fluency 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 post-World War II 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 fluency 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 “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 British and American literatures, 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

In view of these cultural trends, it seems inevitable that fluency would become the authoritative strategy for translating, whether the foreign text was literary or scientific/technical, humanistic or pragmatic, a novel or a restaurant menu. The British translator J. M. Cohen noticed this development as early as 1962, when he remarked that “twentieth-century translators, influenced by science-teaching and the growing importance attached to accuracy […] have generally concentrated on prose-meaning and interpretation, and neglected the imitation of form and manner” (Cohen 1962: 35). Cohen also noticed the domestication involved here, “the risk of reducing individual authors’ styles and national tricks of speech to a plain prose uniformity,” but he felt that this “danger” was avoided by the “best” translations (ibid.: 33). What he failed to see, however, was that the criterion for determining the “best” was still radically English. Translating for “prose-meaning and interpretation,” practicing translation as simple communication, rewrites the foreign text according to such English-language values as fluency and the accompanying effect of transparency, but entirely eclipses the translator’s domesticating work – even in the eyes of the translator.

The translator’s invisibility is also partly determined by the individualistic conception of authorship that continues to prevail in British and American cultures. According to this conception, the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial originality. This view of authorship carries two disadvantageous implications for the translator. On the one hand, translation is defined as a second-order representation: only the foreign text can be original, an authentic copy, true to the author’s personality or intention, whereas the translation is derivative, fake, potentially a false copy. On the other hand, translation is required to efface its second-order status with the effect of transparency, producing the illusion of authorial presence whereby the translated text can be taken as the original. To point out these implications is not to argue that the translator should be seen as comparable to the foreign author: translations are different in intention and effect from original compositions, and this generic distinction is worth preserving as a means of describing different sorts of writing practices. The point is rather that the precise nature of the translator’s authorship remains unformulated, and so the notion of authorial originality continues to stigmatize the translator’s work (see Venuti 1998: chap. 2).

However much the individualistic conception of authorship devalues translation among publishers, reviewers, and readers, it is so pervasive that it also shapes translators’ self-presentations, leading some to psychologize their relationship to the foreign text as a process of identification with the author. The American Willard Trask (1900–80), a major twentieth-century translator in terms of the quantity and cultural importance of his work, drew a clear distinction between authoring and translating. When asked in a late interview whether “the impulse” to translate “is the same as that of someone who wants to write a novel” (a question that is clearly individualistic in its reference to an authorial “impulse”), Trask replied:

No, I wouldn’t say so, because I once tried to write a novel. When you’re writing a novel […] you’re obviously writing about people or places, something or other, but what you are essentially doing is expressing yourself. Whereas when you translate you’re not expressing yourself. You’re performing a technical stunt. […] I realized that the translator and the actor had to have the same kind of talent. What they both do is to take something of somebody else’s and put it over as if it were their own. I think you have to have that capacity. So in addition to the technical stunt, there is a psychological workout, which translation involves: something like being on stage. It does something entirely different from what I think of as creative poetry writing.

(Honig 1985: 13–14)

In Trask’s analogy, translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts. Some translators are aware that any sense of authorial presence in a translation is an illusion, an effect of transparent discourse, comparable to a “stunt,” but they nonetheless assert that they participate in a “psychological” relationship with the author in which they repress their own “personality.” “I guess I consider myself in a kind of collaboration with the author,” says American translator Norman Shapiro; “Certainly my ego and personality are involved in translating, and yet I have to try to stay faithful to the basic text in such a way that my own personality doesn’t show” (Kratz 1986: 27).

The translator’s invisibility is thus a weird self-annihilation, a way of conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in British and American cultures. For although the past fifty years have seen the institution of translation centers and translator training programs at British and American universities, as well as the founding of translation committees, associations, and awards in literary organizations like the Society of Authors in London and the PEN American Center in New York, the fact remains that translators receive minimal recognition for their work – including translators of writing that is capable of generating publicity because it is bestselling, prize-winning, controversial, censored. The typical mention of the translator in a review takes the form of a brief aside in which, more often than not, the fluency or transparency of the translation is gauged.

This, however, is an infrequent occurrence. Ronald Christ has described the prevailing practice: “many newspapers, such as The Los Angeles Times, do not even list the translators in headnotes to reviews, reviewers often fail to mention that a book is a translation (while quoting from the text as though it were written in English), and publishers almost uniformly exclude translators from book covers and advertisements” (Christ 1984: 8). A particularly egregious example of this exclusion occurred in 2001 with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Penguin Classics ran an ad that quoted from reviews praising the translation for its transparency (Allan Massie in the Scotsman: “It reads so naturally that you forget it is a translation”), but nowhere were the translators named (Times Literary Supplement 21 Dec. 2001: 7). Even when the reviewer is also a writer, a novelist, say, or a poet, the fact that the text under review is a translation may be overlooked. In 1981 the Americ...