Schleiermacher made clear that his choice was foreignizing translation, and this led the French translator and translation theorist Antoine Berman to treat Schleiermacher’s argument as an ethics of translation, concerned with making the translated text a place where a cultural other is manifested—although, of course, an otherness that can never be manifested in its own terms, only in those of the target language, and hence always already encoded (Berman 1985:87–91).[9] The “foreign” in foreignizing translation is not a transparent representation of an essence that resides in the foreign text and is valuable in itself, but a strategic construction whose value is contingent on the current target-language situation. Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. In its effort to do right abroad, this translation method must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience—choosing to translate a foreign text excluded by domestic literary canons, for instance, or using a marginal discourse to translate it.
I want to suggest that insofar as foreignizing translation seeks to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation, it is highly desirable today, a strategic cultural intervention in the current state of world affairs, pitched against the hegemonic English-language nations and the unequal cultural exchanges in which they engage their global others. Foreignizing translation in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations. As a theory and practice of translation, however, a foreignizing method is specific to certain European countries at particular historical moments: formulated first in German culture during the classical and romantic periods, it has recently been revived in a French cultural scene characterized by postmodern developments in philosophy, literary {21} criticism, psychoanalysis, and social theory that have come to be known as “poststructuralism.”[10] Anglo-American culture, in contrast, has long been dominated by domesticating theories that recommend fluent translating. By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to English-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the very difference that translation is called on to convey. This ethnocentric violence is evident in the translation theories put forth by the prolific and influential Eugene Nida, translation consultant to the American Bible Society: here transparency is enlisted in the service of Christian humanism.
Consider Nida’s concept of “dynamic” or “functional equivalence” in translation, formulated first in 1964, but restated and developed in numerous books and articles over the past thirty years. “A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression,” states Nida, “and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture” (Nida 1964:159). The phrase “naturalness of expression” signals the importance of a fluent strategy to this theory of translation, and in Nida’s work it is obvious that fluency involves domestication. As he has recently put it, “the translator must be a person who can draw aside the curtains of linguistic and cultural differences so that people may see clearly the relevance of the original message” (Nida and de Waard 1986:14). This is of course a relevance to the target-language culture, something with which foreign writers are usually not concerned when they write their texts, so that relevance can be established in the translation process only by replacing source-language features that are not recognizable with target-language ones that are. Thus, when Nida asserts that “an easy and natural style in translating, despite the extreme difficulty of producing it […] is nevertheless essential to producing in the ultimate receptors a response similar to that of the original receptors” (Nida 1964:163), he is in fact imposing the English-language valorization of transparent discourse on every foreign culture, masking a basic disjunction between the source-and target-language texts which puts into question the possibility of eliciting a “similar” response.
Typical of other theorists in the Anglo-American tradition, however, Nida has argued that dynamic equivalence is consistent with a notion of accuracy. The dynamically equivalent translation does not indiscriminately use “anything which might have special {22} impact and appeal for receptors”; it rather “means thoroughly understanding not only the meaning of the source text but also the manner in which the intended receptors of a text are likely to understand it in the receptor language” (Nida and de Waard 1986:vii–viii, 9). For Nida, accuracy in translation depends on generating an equivalent effect in the target-language culture: “the receptors of a translation should comprehend the translated text to such an extent that they can understand how the original receptors must have understood the original text” (ibid.:36). The dynamically equivalent translation is “interlingual communication” which overcomes the linguistic and cultural differences that impede it (ibid.:11). Yet the understanding of the foreign text and culture which this kind of translation makes possible answers fundamentally to target-language cultural values while veiling this domestication in the transparency evoked by a fluent strategy. Communication here is initiated and controlled by the target-language culture, it is in fact an interested interpretation, and therefore it seems less an exchange of information than an appropriation of a foreign text for domestic purposes. Nida’s theory of translation as communication does not adequately take into account the ethnocentric violence that is inherent in every translation process—but especially in one governed by dynamic equivalence.
Nida’s advocacy of domesticating translation is explicitly grounded on a transcendental concept of humanity as an essence that remains unchanged over time and space. “As linguists and anthropologists have discovered,” Nida states, “that which unites mankind is much greater than that which divides, and hence there is, even in cases of very disparate languages and cultures, a basis for communication” (Nida 1964:2). Nida’s humanism may appear to be democratic in its appeal to “that which unites mankind,” but this is contradicted by the more exclusionary values that inform his theory of translation, specifically Christian evangelism and cultural elitism. From the very beginning of his career, Nida’s work has been motivated by the exigencies of Bible translation: not only have problems in the history of Bible translation served as examples for his theoretical statements, but he has written studies in anthropology and linguistics designed primarily for Bible translators and missionaries. Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence in fact links the translator to the missionary. When in Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions (1954) he asserted that “a close examination of successful missionary {23} work inevitably reveals the correspondingly effective manner in which the missionaries were able to identify themselves with the people—‘to be all things to all men’—and to communicate their message in terms which have meaning for the lives of the people” (Nida 1975:250), he was echoing what he had earlier asserted of the Bible translator in God’s Word in Man’s Language (1952): “The task of the true translator is one of identification. As a Christian servant he must identify with Christ; as a translator he must identify himself with the Word; as a missionary he must identify himself with the people” (Nida 1952:117). Both the missionary and the translator must find the dynamic equivalent in the target language so as to establish the relevance of the Bible in the target culture. But Nida permits only a particular kind of relevance to be established. While he disapproves of “the tendency to promote by means of Bible translating the cause of a particular theological viewpoint, whether deistic, rationalistic, immersionistic, millenarian, or charismatic” (Nida and de Waard 1986:33), it is obvious that he himself has promoted a reception of the text centered in Christian dogma. And although he offers a nuanced account of how “diversities in the backgrounds of receptors” can shape any Bible translation, he insists that “translations prepared primarily for minority groups must generally involve highly restrictive forms of language, but they must not involve substandard grammar or vulgar wording” (ibid.:14). Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation goes hand in hand with an evangelical zeal that seeks to impose on English-language readers a specific dialect of English as well as a distinctly Christian understanding of the Bible. When Nida’s translator identifies with the target-language reader to communicate the foreign text, he simultaneously excludes other target-language cultural constituencies.
[9]
Schleiermacher’s theory, despite its stress on foreignizing translation, is complicated by the nationalist cultural program he wants German translation to serve: see chapter 3, pp. 101–116.
[10]
For the impact of poststructuralism on translation theory and practice, see, for example, Graham 1985, Benjamin 1989, Niranjana 1992, and Venuti 1992. Gentzler 1993: Chap. 6 surveys this movement.