The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Nation 117
Schleiermacher perceived between the field of commerce and the fields
of art and scholarship has been eroded—if it ever existed as more than
a fiction designed to consolidate literature as a transcendental cultural
concept. Transparent discourse is eminently consumable in the
contemporary cultural marketplace, which in turn influences
publishing decisions to exclude foreign texts that preempt
transparency.
Schleiermacher shows that the first opportunity to foreignize
translation occurs in the choice of foreign text, wherein the translator
can resist the dominant discourse in Anglo-American culture by
restoring excluded texts and possibly reforming the canon of foreign
literatures in English. Schleiermacher also suggests that foreignizing
translation puts to work a specific discursive strategy. He opposes
the foregrounding of the signified by which fluent translation
produces the effect of transparency; for him a translation can be
foreignized only by approximating the play of signifiers in the
foreign text: “the more closely the translation follows the turns taken
by the original, the more foreign it will seem to the reader” (Lefevere
1977:78).
Schleiermacher’s lecture provides the tools for conceptualizing a
revolt against the dominance of transparent discourse in current
English-language translation. Yet the effects of this dominance have
included, not only the widespread implementation of fluent
strategies, but the marginalization of texts in the history of
translation that can yield alternative theories and practices—like
Schleiermacher’s lecture. With rare exceptions, English-language
theorists and practitioners of English-language translation have
neglected Schleiermacher. His lecture has been recognized as a key
“modern” statement in translation theory only recently, and it was
not translated into English until 1977. 6 And even its translator, André
Lefevere, felt compelled to question Schleiermacher’s value: “his
requirement that the translation should ‘give the feel’ of the source
language must […] strike us increasingly as odd” (Lefevere 1977:67).
Lefevere argued that translation should be domesticating, as “most
theoreticians” recommended, and he specifically referred to Eugene
Nida’s version of this theory, quoting Nida to criticize
Schleiermacher:
In effect, we are faced here with a not-illogical and very spirited
defence of what we know now as “translationese” or, with
another phrase: “static equivalence,” and which is still very