venuti

Invisibility 21criticism, psychoanalysis, and social theory that have come to beknown as “poststructuralism.” 10 Anglo-American culture, in contrast,has long been dominated by domesticating theories that recommendfluent translating. By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluenttranslation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in factinscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial toEnglish-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the verydifference that translation is called on to convey. This ethnocentricviolence is evident in the translation theories put forth by the prolificand influential Eugene Nida, translation consultant to the AmericanBible Society: here transparency is enlisted in the service of Christianhumanism.Consider Nida’s concept of “dynamic” or “functionalequivalence” in translation, formulated first in 1964, but restated anddeveloped in numerous books and articles over the past thirty years.“A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalnessof expression,” states Nida, “and tries to relate the receptor to modesof behavior relevant within the context of his own culture” (Nida1964:159). The phrase “naturalness of expression” signals theimportance of a fluent strategy to this theory of translation, and inNida’s work it is obvious that fluency involves domestication. As hehas recently put it, “the translator must be a person who can drawaside the curtains of linguistic and cultural differences so that peoplemay see clearly the relevance of the original message” (Nida and deWaard 1986:14). This is of course a relevance to the target-languageculture, something with which foreign writers are usually notconcerned when they write their texts, so that relevance can beestablished in the translation process only by replacing sourcelanguagefeatures that are not recognizable with target-language onesthat are. Thus, when Nida asserts that “an easy and natural style intranslating, despite the extreme difficulty of producing it […] isnevertheless essential to producing in the ultimate receptors aresponse similar to that of the original receptors” (Nida 1964:163), heis in fact imposing the English-language valorization of transparentdiscourse on every foreign culture, masking a basic disjunctionbetween the source-and target-language texts which puts intoquestion the possibility of eliciting a “similar” response.Typical of other theorists in the Anglo-American tradition,however, Nida has argued that dynamic equivalence is consistentwith a notion of accuracy. The dynamically equivalent translationdoes not indiscriminately use “anything which might have special