Translation
Fidelity vs. Transparency
Fidelity
(or faithfulness) and transparency are
two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven
for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are
often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles
infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or
beautiful, but not both at the same time. Fidelity pertains to the extent to
which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without
adding to or subtracting from it, without intensifying or weakening any part of
the meaning, and otherwise without distorting it. Transparency pertains to the
extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target
language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the
language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions. A translation that
meets the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a
translation that meets the second criterion, an "idiomatic
translation". The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a
translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original
contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its
social or historical context, and so forth. The criteria for judging the
transparency of a translation appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic
translation "sounds wrong", and in the extreme case of word-for-word
translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often results in
patent nonsense with only a humorous value (see Round-trip translation).
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to
produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of
religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source
text. In doing so, they often deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target
language to produce an unidiomatic text. Similarly, a literary translator may
wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in order to provide
"local color" in the translation. In recent decades, prominent
advocates of such "non-transparent" translation have included the
French scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies
inherent in most prose translations,[13] and the American theorist Lawrence
Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply "foreign zing"
translation strategies instead of domesticating ones. Many
non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts from German Romanticism,
the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of "foreignization"
being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his
seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he
distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward
[the reader]", i.e., transparency, and those that move the "reader
toward [the author]", i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the
source text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter approach. His preference
was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a
nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German
literature. For the most part, current Western practices in translation are
dominated by the concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency".
This has not always been the case. There have been periods, especially in
pre-Classical Rome and in the 18th century, when many translators stepped
beyond the bounds of translation proper into the realm of ''adaptation''.
Adapted translation retains currency in some non-Western traditions. Thus the
Indian epic, the Ramayana, appears in many versions in the various Indian
languages, and the stories are different in each. Anyone considering the words used for
translating into the Indian languages, whether those be Aryan or Dravidian
languages, will be struck by the freedom that is granted to the translators.
This may relate to devotion to prophetic passages that strike a deep religious
chord, or to a vocation to instruct unbelievers. Similar examples are to be
found in medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to the customs
and values of the audience.
