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312 The Translator’s Invisibilitywhich the foreign text enters the public domain, although only for thepurposes of translation. Given the speed with which literature currentlydates as a commodity on the international book market, the prospectthat translation rights will be sold grows less likely as time passes, andthe translation of a foreign text ultimately depends on the efforts of atranslator to interest a publisher, especially in Anglo-Americanpublishing, where so few editors read foreign languages. If, uponpublication, a foreign text is not an instant critical and commercialsuccess in the culture for which it was written, it probably won’t besought by target-language publishers. The project to translate it,therefore, should be controlled by the translator, who, in effect, mustinvent for target-language readers a foreign text that would otherwisebe nonexistent to them.A change in contemporary thinking about translation finallyrequires a change in the practice of reading, reviewing, and teachingtranslations. Because translation is a double writing, a rewriting of theforeign text according to domestic cultural values, any translationrequires a double reading—as both communication and inscription.Reading a translation as a translation means reflecting on itsconditions, the domestic dialects and discourses in which it is writtenand the domestic cultural situation in which it is read. This reading ishistoricizing: it draws a distinction between the (foreign) past and the(domestic) present. Evaluating a translation as a translation meansassessing it as an intervention into a present situation. Reviews mustnot be limited to rare comments on the style of a translation or itsaccuracy according to canons that are applied implicitly. Reviewersshould consider the canons of accuracy that the translator has set in thework, judging the decision to translate and publish a foreign text inview of the current canon of that foreign literature in the targetlanguageculture.It is in academic institutions, most importantly, that differentreading practices can be developed and applied to translations. Here adouble reading is crucial. A translation yields information about thesource-language text—its discursive structures, its themes and ideas—but no translation should ever be taught as a transparentrepresentation of that text, even if this is the prevalent practice today.Any information derived from the translation is inevitably presentedin target-language terms, which must be made the object of study, ofclassroom discussion and advanced research. Research into translationcan never be simply descriptive; merely to formulate translation as atopic in cultural history or criticism assumes an opposition to its