CARS 04 · Humanities: translation and literary interpretation
What a Translator Owes
A humanities passage on the old quarrel between faithful and fluent translation.
Passage
Two ideals have long competed in discussions of translation. The first demands fidelity: the translator should stay as close to the original as the new language allows, even at the cost of awkwardness, so that the reader meets the author’s own words as nearly as possible. The second demands fluency: the translation should read as though it had been written in the new language, so that the reader never feels the presence of an intermediary. Each ideal has its partisans, and each accuses the other of betrayal. One side speaks of translations that are smooth and false; the other of translations that are faithful and unreadable.
The dispute appears to concern how much to sacrifice, but it rests on a shared assumption that is rarely examined: that a text has a content which can be separated from its form and carried across the border like cargo from one ship to another. If this were so, the only question would be how carefully to carry it. Yet anyone who has tried to translate a joke knows that the content and the manner of telling cannot be pulled apart. A pun cannot be transferred; at best, the translator can build another pun, in another place, that does a similar job. In doing so she has not delivered the original’s content, but has decided what the original was doing and found a way of doing it again.
Consider a novel whose prose sounds strange even to the readers of its own language, because the author wished it to. A sentence may be deliberately stiff, or may repeat the same word until the repetition becomes oppressive. A fluent translation, polishing away the stiffness and varying the vocabulary, would produce a pleasant book that was not the book the author wrote. A hyper-literal translation might reproduce the oddity in a way that sounds, in the new language, merely clumsy. Neither has served the original. What the translator needs to know is why the sentence is strange, and that is a question about the work, not about the dictionary.
It follows that every translation embodies an interpretation. Before choosing a single word, the translator must have decided what matters most in the passage: its sound, its argument, its irony, its place in a larger pattern. Different translators reasonably decide differently, which is why important works are translated again in each generation. This should not be treated as a scandal. A later translation does not show that an earlier one was wrong in the way that a later calculation can show an earlier one to be wrong; it shows that the work was large enough to support more than one reading.
None of this makes translation arbitrary. The interpretation a translator adopts can be judged by asking whether the text supports it. A version that turns an author’s deliberate repetition into varied phrasing has missed something that is plainly on the page, and a critic can point to it. The translator’s obligation is therefore neither fidelity to the words nor smoothness for the reader, but a responsibility that includes both: to understand the original well enough to know what it is doing, and to be accountable for the choices made in doing it again.
Questions
Question 1 of 6
The main point of the passage is that:
The passage rejects the idea that either ideal is sufficient. Both fidelity and fluency are criticized.
The final paragraph says translation is not arbitrary, because interpretations can be judged against the text.
The joke is an illustration of a general problem. The author goes on to discuss prose that is strange by design.
Why the answer is what it is
The second and third paragraphs argue that content cannot be separated from manner, the fourth that every translation is therefore an interpretation, and the fifth that interpretations can still be judged.
Question 2 of 6
The author discusses a novel with deliberately strange prose in order to show that:
The author does not say the novel cannot be translated, only that neither extreme approach serves it.
The passage does not say anything about how authors should write.
The author says that a hyper-literal translation may also fail, by sounding merely clumsy.
Why the answer is what it is
The example shows both approaches failing without an understanding of why the original is strange, which the author calls a question about the work, not the dictionary.
Question 3 of 6
According to the passage, why are important works translated again in each generation?
The author specifically denies that later translations show earlier ones to be wrong in this way.
The passage never mentions change in language as a reason for retranslation.
The passage says translators reasonably decide differently, not that each generation moves toward greater literalness.
Why the answer is what it is
The fourth paragraph says new translations show that the work was “large enough to support more than one reading.”
Question 4 of 6
The author’s attitude toward the dispute between the fidelity and fluency camps is best described as:
The author criticizes literalism as well as fluency.
The author says fluent translation can produce a pleasant book that is not the one the author wrote.
The author evaluates the dispute, arguing that both sides assume content can be separated from form.
Why the answer is what it is
The second paragraph says the dispute rests on a shared assumption that is rarely examined, and the rest of the passage argues against it.
Question 5 of 6
Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author’s claim that every translation embodies an interpretation?
This would support the author’s view that different interpretations can each be defended against the text.
Pay has no bearing on whether translation requires interpretation.
Reader preference does not show whether the translator has made interpretive choices.
Why the answer is what it is
If a mechanical procedure could produce translations that every competent reader judged equivalent, translation would not require deciding what the original is doing. That would undercut the author’s claim.
Question 6 of 6
Which of the following is most analogous to the error the author attributes to both camps?
This concerns skill, not the assumption that a thing has a separable content that is simply carried across.
This is an assumption about serving temperature and has nothing to do with separating content from form.
This claims that something cannot be transferred. The error in the passage is a belief about what the thing to be transferred is.
Why the answer is what it is
Both camps assume that a text has a content that can be separated from its manner and carried across. The recipe example makes the parallel assumption about a dish, and ignores how the thing is made and presented.