Are Translators Traitors?

Are translators traitors? 

The challenge of translation is to make the reader of the translation know or able to discuss a text as much a reader of the original text would. This challenge was brought to light with the Italian adage “traduttore, traditore”, also used in English “translator, traitor” and other languages: “traductor traidor”, “traducteur menteur".

Translation is taught and learnt, but the translator’s culture, experience, background, general knowledge and habits influence their work. So how much can we evaluate a translation as “good” or “bad” when it relies so much on such variable criteria and personal skills? How can the translator justify a choice of translation when one word often “feels more right” than another? 

The uniqueness of every language

Every language carries its own cultural and literary specificities that can sometimes be found in other languages, but we often feel a lack of accuracy to transmit the original sense at the time of translating. Accuracy is probably the most expected skill from a translator even though a text has to be betrayed to make it more intelligible.

Every text has a clear meaning understood by everyone but can also have a deeper truth that not everybody can perceive. In this “continuum of impossibility”, the translator acts like an intermediary and moves along the spectrum of this continuum to analyse a text and make it understandable. Experience makes translators be relevant in their decision-making and involves a great appropriation of the text to be able to make it clear. It also questions the idea of quantifying a language or a translation: claiming a language to be easy compared to another, once again, relies on very personal characteristics and experience as translators must keep juggling between remaining faithful to the text and being comprehensible.

The singularity of every language offers a variety of ways for the authors to express themselves, which is why some authors use foreign languages that translators choose not to translate to keep the true meaning of the source text. The issue of untranslatability is a theory on how far or near a translator can get close to the source text.

The perfect translation or the quest for the Holy Grail   

Umberto Eco calls translation “an admirable treason” as it has always been necessary to translate texts. Is translation “just a job” or are translators purposely and consciously lying to their readers? And is this “act of cultural treachery” justified when communication is needed? They put their skills to develop communication but the issue is to know how much translators are allowed to add or to take off a text.         
The very definition does not answer the question, so much so that every translator and teacher developed their own idea on the subject and can be contradictory on their definition of what a good translation is.

“Translation is the art of failure” - Umberto Eco

Born translator?

There are several preconceptions about how a good translator must be. Bilingualism is one of them. How bilingualism is defined is, like translation itself, also a changing definition. A translator doubtlessly need to understand, speak and write a language fluently but is it necessary to be a “native” speaker? Does it mean that a translator who has learnt a language later on in life is less good at translating? And conversely, are bilingual people “natural” translators bearing translation as an innate gift?

On the other hand is a native speaker necessarily a good and reliable translator? First, as translation is taught, it means that there are ways to translate that not everyone knows as they have not acquired the skills. It is not because someone speaks two languages fluently that finding equivalences in each language is easier.

Translators are texts tamers, struggling with the strict norms of every language. Most people do not understand the amount of work that it represents as they do not understand that languages are not all equivalent, and that is requires so much exactness and linguistic smoothness. 

Laura R.