Against Fluent Translation

In the English-language context, it is typically assumed that a good translation is one that reads as though it had originally been written in English. The scholar and translator Lawrence Venuti calls this fluent translation, as opposed to foreignizing translation, which emphasizes the original's difference from English. As Venuti points out, there is a political dimension to which method a translator chooses, or a publisher accepts. If the translation is fluent, the text is domesticated, folded into English-language cultures and values; if it is foreignizing, it makes use of English-language cultures and values to make the text intelligible without assimilating it, at the very least signalling that the text is the product of a different cultural paradigm.

Despite the supremacy of the rhetoric of diversity in American liberal politics, the conservative impulse to render all translations fluent continues to dominate. Few translations (about three percent of American book-length publications in a given year) ever reach English-language readers and those that do are, almost without exception, fluent. Diverse literary voices are only acceptable if they are easily assimilated by American readers, easily interpreted along American political lines and social values. When translators are mentioned at all, they are either praised for clarity and accuracy (even when the reviewer can't read the original) or damned for awkwardness and obscurity. At the heart of this understanding of translation is a decidedly American assumption of human universality, a belief that emotion translates smoothly from one context to another without need for mediation, that an essential, cohesive self can be metaphysically expressed in a text, regardless of its original language, and that difference is identity-based and superimposed upon a foundational, generalized humanity. 

This means, in practice, that literary works that are thorny, difficult, recalcitrant, strange, that is, in some way, unassimilable, almost never get translated into English. Monolingual English speakers exist in a culturally coherent bubble, challenged only by alternatives that are nevertheless contextually intelligible. The current practice of translation permits American readers to presume their own normalcy and insists on a utopian, near-magic conception of communication across languages and cultures. Fluent translation is cultural isolationism clothed in anodyne diversity politics. Its a way to take credit for multiculturalism without confronting its challenges, self-satisfaction in the guise of humility.

This doesn't mean that every translation needs to be enormously challenging for English-language readers: it means that not every literary work can be rendered in smooth, lucid, concise English. It means that a genuine interest in openness to the other requires living with some frustration and discomfort, moments in which the reader realizes a given work wasn't written just for him. Foreignizing translation threatens the reader's narcissistic sense of normalcy and cultural superiority. It's impossible for any one person to learn all living languages, but foreignizing translation, translation that embraces alterity, with all its difficulty, with all its irreducible untranslatability, has the potential power to foment cultural exchange without the prerequisite of universalism, in itself culturally contingent. If diversity is to be genuinely valued in American literary culture, then fluent translation needs to be recognized as the assimilationist practice that it is, and foreignizing translation must be encouraged. If we can't tolerate a text that doesn't pander to our own values, how can we hope to be tolerant of human beings different from ourselves?