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114 The Translator’s Invisibilitytarget-language cultural values, and so can do little to question thedominance of transparent discourse in translation today. On thecontrary, Schleiermacher’s psychologization of the text assumestransparency, the illusory presence of the foreign author in thetranslation.There is another kind of thinking in his lecture that runs counterto this idealist strain, even if impossibly caught in its tangles: arecognition of the cultural and social conditions of language and aprojection of a translation practice that takes them into accountinstead of working to conceal them. Schleiermacher sees translationas an everyday fact of life, not merely an activity performed on literaryand philosophical texts, but necessary for intersubjectiveunderstanding, active in the very process of communication, becauselanguage is determined by various differences—cultural, social,historical:For not only are the dialects spoken by different tribes belonging tothe same nation, and the different stages of the same language ordialect in different centuries, different languages in the strict senseof the word; moreover even contemporaries who are not separatedby dialects, but merely belong to different classes, which are notoften linked through social intercourse and are far apart ineducation, often can understand each other only by means of asimilar mediation.(Lefevere 1977:68)This observation clearly requires Schleiermacher to revise hisnationalist concept of “the spirit of the language”: he understands itas “the repository of a system of observations and shades of mood,”but this is too monolithic and too psychologistic to admit the conceptof “different classes,” a social hierarchy of cultural discourses, each sodistinctively class-coded as to impede communication.Schleiermacher even finds it “inevitable that different opinionsshould develop as to” foreignizing translation strategies, “differentschools, so to speak, will arise among the masters, and differentparties among the audience as followers of those schools,” but heultimately individualizes the “different points of view,” reducingthem to the translator’s consciousness, transforming culturalpractices with social implications into self-centered eccentricities:“each one in itself will always be of relative and subjective valueonly” (ibid.:81).