Equivalence and Competence

Translation is often associated with equivalence. The goal of the translator in modern times is to create a seamless transition between a text and its translation, which is supposed to be marked by the ‘absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities’. ‘All that is foreign or strange’ should be ‘deleted, every rough corner smoothed’. Such an emptying out of the translator's role as a writer brings the reward of a reader who imagines that he or she is actually reading the original work. But this assumed achievement is impoverished by what many perceive as vitiating costs. Nabokov, while he was engaged in translating Pushkin, passionately exclaimed that the claim that ‘so-and-so's translation reads smoothly’ sent him into ‘spasms of helpless fury’. A ‘readable’ translation has merely ‘substituted easy platitudes for the breath taking intricacies of the text’. As well as Nabokov's amour propre about the kind of respect that should be offered to a great writer's work, there has been much passionate objection on ethical grounds. No translation is innocently neutral, nor should seek to be. Every lexical choice, every syntactic choice, is freighted with social and cultural assumptions that shape the resulting prose or poetry, sometimes in ways that work against or even betray the original text: traduttore/traditore [translator/traitor].