Translation

Translatio, in Latin, suggests a crossing from one waterside to another. Imagine translation, therefore, as an exercise in ferrying texts from the home linguistic shore over to the farther shore of the target language. But the efforts of those responsible for that transportation, namely translators themselves, often go unnoticed. Frequently their contributions to the conveyance of cultural products are celebrated only insofar as those contributions are deemed unobtrusive. Discretion is demanded of translators, just as the best translation is praised only if it hardly registers as a translation at all. But contemporary translation studies seek to retrieve translators from the shadows and celebrate their work as cultural mediators. Indeed, instead of imagining translators as ferrymen and women reducing linguistic difference to naught (or reducing bodies of water to dry land), the current argument is that it is better to highlight that difference so that readers do notice that someone—a translator—invested time, expertise, craft, and creativity into facilitating the passage from one language to another. If one of the central aims of contemporary translation studies is to contest the under-appreciation of translators, another aim is to combat the pervasive tendency to damn translators with faint praise. Translatory felicities are acknowledged, but zealous notifications of what was lost in translation proliferate in commentaries on translations. That scanty praise disappears entirely with the declaration that, in Italian, trips so readily off the tongue: traduttore, traditore (“translator, betrayer”). But that betrayal is only inevitable if translations are enjoined to the impossible task of achieving perfect identification with original texts. One undertaking of translation studies is accordingly the sometimes wearied, sometimes sharply exasperated inspection of the repeated attempts to impose unworkable burdens upon translators. Those attempts have been repeated so often as to constitute a significant portion of the history of reflection on translation as such. By the same token, translation studies narrates its own history as a steady emancipation from the centuries-old shackles of dogma: the prescription that translations ought to be faithful to original texts and the edict that translations should replicate original texts exactly. Three emancipatory moments may be identified. First, certain intellectual and literary developments in Germany during the age of Romanticism lent unprecedented sophistication to debate and reflection concerning translation. Second, a number of 20th-century efforts to provide translation studies with viable methodologies and greater scientific or empirical rigor enhanced the study of translation as an academic discipline (or interdiscipline). Third, the acknowledgment that translation is hardly something to be studied exclusively from a Western or European perspective encouraged the deployment of critical and theoretical paradigms drawn from cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. This led to a greater awareness that translation can be a touchstone for current debates concerning diversity, intersectionality, and, indeed, the complexities of identity itself, given the fact that identity is necessarily informed by the languages one speaks, cannot speak, refuses to speak, or speaks imperfectly.