“Invisibility” is the term I will u

“Invisibility” is the term I will use to describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary British and American cultures. It refers to at least two mutually determining phenomena: one is an illusionistic effect of discourse, of the translator’s own manipulation of the translating language, English in this case; the other is the practice of reading and evaluating translations that has long prevailed in the United Kingdom and the United States, among other cultures, both Anglophone and foreign-language. A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text– the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” The illusion of transparency is an effect of a fluent translation strategy, of the translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. But readers also play a significant role in insuring that this illusory effect occurs because of the general tendency to read translations mainly for meaning, to reduce the stylistic features of the translation to the foreign text or writer, and to question any language use that might interfere with the seemingly untroubled communication of the foreign writer’s intention. What is so remarkable here is that the effect of transparency conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator’s crucial intervention. The more fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text.