The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Invisibility 21
criticism, psychoanalysis, and social theory that have come to be
known as “poststructuralism.” 10 Anglo-American culture, in contrast,
has long been dominated by domesticating theories that recommend
fluent translating. By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent
translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in fact
inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to
English-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the very
difference that translation is called on to convey. This ethnocentric
violence is evident in the translation theories put forth by the prolific
and influential Eugene Nida, translation consultant to the American
Bible Society: here transparency is enlisted in the service of Christian
humanism.
Consider Nida’s concept of “dynamic” or “functional
equivalence” in translation, formulated first in 1964, but restated and
developed in numerous books and articles over the past thirty years.
“A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness
of expression,” states Nida, “and tries to relate the receptor to modes
of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture” (Nida
1964:159). The phrase “naturalness of expression” signals the
importance of a fluent strategy to this theory of translation, and in
Nida’s work it is obvious that fluency involves domestication. As he
has recently put it, “the translator must be a person who can draw
aside the curtains of linguistic and cultural differences so that people
may see clearly the relevance of the original message” (Nida and de
Waard 1986:14). This is of course a relevance to the target-language
culture, something with which foreign writers are usually not
concerned when they write their texts, so that relevance can be
established in the translation process only by replacing sourcelanguage
features that are not recognizable with target-language ones
that are. Thus, when Nida asserts that “an easy and natural style in
translating, despite the extreme difficulty of producing it […] is
nevertheless essential to producing in the ultimate receptors a
response similar to that of the original receptors” (Nida 1964:163), he
is in fact imposing the English-language valorization of transparent
discourse on every foreign culture, masking a basic disjunction
between the source-and target-language texts which puts into
question the possibility of eliciting a “similar” response.
Typical of other theorists in the Anglo-American tradition,
however, Nida has argued that dynamic equivalence is consistent
with a notion of accuracy. The dynamically equivalent translation
does not indiscriminately use “anything which might have special