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. 49 | P a g e Global
Translation Institute (GTI)
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 "foreignizing" 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 50 | P a g e Global Translation Institute (GTI)
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.
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