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The Foreign and the Home

Whether a translation should bring the author home or send the reader abroad is the form the field’s third conflict takes, what a translator owes the foreign text, the home reader and the languages between them. The question runs from the German Romantics to the ethics and politics of translation, and the theorists on this page share it without sharing an answer.

Schleiermacher’s lecture of 1813, On the Different Methods of Translating, restated the old opposition as a choice of direction. Either the translator leaves the author in peace as far as possible and moves the reader towards him, or leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. There are, he held, only these two roads, they cannot be mixed, and for the German language of his day the first was the one to take: a translation should let the foreign be felt, and a language grows by bending to what it receives. The lecture stands behind most later argument about foreignising translation, and Antoine Berman’s L’épreuve de l’étranger (1984) reconstructed the Romantic tradition it belongs to, from Herder and Goethe through the Schlegels and Humboldt to Hölderlin, as the moment translation was first thought of as a trial by the foreign rather than a service to the reader.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923) is the tradition’s most radical statement. Translation does not transmit information or serve a public: translatability is a property of the work, and a translation belongs to the original’s afterlife (Fortleben). Languages differ in their way of meaning while intending the same thing, and their kinship lies in supplementing one another towards a pure language in which the ways of meaning are reconciled; from this follows his preference for literalness, with the interlinear version of Scripture as the ideal. Later theorists have mostly kept the afterlife, the way of meaning and the case for the letter and left the pure language with him.

Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility (1995) took Schleiermacher’s two roads and Berman’s trial of the foreign and made them an ethics. Anglo-American publishing, he argued, prizes fluency: a translation reads well when it reads as if it were not one, and the translator’s labour and the source’s difference are effaced together. He named the two strategies domestication, which brings the author home, and foreignisation, which sends the reader abroad, and argued for the second as a resistance to the receiving culture’s values. The argument has been contested from both sides, as an elitism that makes translations hard to read and as a binary that most actual translations straddle, and it remains the field’s most cited statement of what a translator owes.

The postcolonial turn asked the same question with the power relations made explicit. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, in Translation, History and Culture (1990), announced a cultural turn: translation is rewriting, rewriting is manipulation in the service of ideology and poetics, and the unit of study is not the sentence but the culture. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “The Politics of Translation” (1992), written from her own translations of Mahasweta Devi, charged that translation into English flattens the rhetoricity of Third World texts into a uniform “translatese” and argued for a surrender to the text that keeps its difference legible, a literalism that disrupts easy access. Here the ethics of translation becomes a politics of which languages are translated into which, and on whose terms.