The Translator’s Invisibility

This questioning must also be conducted in the language of contracts with publishers. Translators will do well to insist on their authorial relation to the translated text during negotiations. They should demand contracts that define the translation as an “original work of authorship” instead of a “work-for-hire,” that copyright the translation in the translator’s name, and that offer standard financial terms for authors, namely an advance against royalties and a share of subsidiary rights sales. In the long run, it will be necessary to effect a more fundamental change, a revision of current copyright law that restricts the foreign author’s control over the translation so as to acknowledge its relative autonomy from the foreign text. The foreign author’s translation rights should be limited to a short period, after {312} which the foreign text enters the public domain, although only for the purposes of translation. Given the speed with which literature currently dates as a commodity on the international book market, the prospect that translation rights will be sold grows less likely as time passes, and the translation of a foreign text ultimately depends on the efforts of a translator to interest a publisher, especially in Anglo-American publishing, where so few editors read foreign languages. If, upon publication, a foreign text is not an instant critical and commercial success in the culture for which it was written, it probably won’t be sought by target-language publishers. The project to translate it, therefore, should be controlled by the translator, who, in effect, must invent for target-language readers a foreign text that would otherwise be nonexistent to them.

A change in contemporary thinking about translation finally requires a change in the practice of reading, reviewing, and teaching translations. Because translation is a double writing, a rewriting of the foreign text according to domestic cultural values, any translation requires a double reading—as both communication and inscription. Reading a translation as a translation means reflecting on its conditions, the domestic dialects and discourses in which it is written and the domestic cultural situation in which it is read. This reading is historicizing: it draws a distinction between the (foreign) past and the (domestic) present. Evaluating a translation as a translation means assessing it as an intervention into a present situation. Reviews must not be limited to rare comments on the style of a translation or its accuracy according to canons that are applied implicitly. Reviewers should consider the canons of accuracy that the translator has set in the work, judging the decision to translate and publish a foreign text in view of the current canon of that foreign literature in the target-language culture.

It is in academic institutions, most importantly, that different reading practices can be developed and applied to translations. Here a double reading is crucial. A translation yields information about the source-language text—its discursive structures, its themes and ideas— but no translation should ever be taught as a transparent representation of that text, even if this is the prevalent practice today. Any information derived from the translation is inevitably presented in target-language terms, which must be made the object of study, of classroom discussion and advanced research. Research into translation can never be simply descriptive; merely to formulate translation as a topic in cultural history or criticism assumes an opposition to its {313} marginal position in the current hierarchy of cultural practices. And the choice of a topic from a specific historical period will always bear on present cultural concerns. Yet even if research into translation cannot be viewed as descriptive, devoid of cultural and political interests, it should not aim to be simply prescriptive, approving or rejecting translation theories and practices without carefully examining their relationships to their own moments and to that of the researcher.

The translator’s invisibility today raises such troubling questions about the geopolitical economy of culture that a greater suspicion toward translation is urgently needed to confront them. Yet the suspicion I am encouraging here assumes a utopian faith in the power of translation to make a difference, not only at home, in the emergence of new cultural forms, but also abroad, in the emergence of new cultural relations. To recognize the translator’s invisibility is at once to critique the current situation and to hope for a future more hospitable to the differences that the translator must negotiate.

Bibliography

Abrams, M.H. (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Adams, R.M. (1979) “From Langue d’Oc and Langue d’Oïl,” New York Times Book Review, 25 February, pp. 14, 36.