The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

312 The Translator’s Invisibility
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 targetlanguage
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