CAT 2017 Slot 1 VARC: What Does Fidelity in Translation Mean?

Every translator inherits an impossible brief: reproduce, in a second language, an effect that was achieved using resources—sound, syntax, cultural allusion, the particular weight of a word's history—that the second language does not possess. The eighteenth-century distinction between "faithful" and "beautiful" translation, still invoked casually today, presents this brief as a simple trade-off, as though a translator dials a single knob between fidelity to the source and readability in the target, sacrificing one for the other. Contemporary translation theory has mostly abandoned this picture, not because fidelity and readability never conflict, but because the dichotomy misdescribes what fidelity to a text actually requires.

Consider the influential distinction, formalised by the theorist Lawrence Venuti, between domesticating and foreignising translation. A domesticating translation smooths away the foreignness of the source, rendering it in fluent, idiomatic target-language prose that reads as though it had been written natively—Venuti's own view is that this fluency is achieved at a cost, effacing the translator's presence and the text's cultural origin so thoroughly that the reader forgets a translation is even occurring. A foreignising translation, by contrast, deliberately retains syntactic or lexical traces of the source language, accepting awkwardness or strangeness in the target text as the price of signalling that the original was written elsewhere, in another linguistic and conceptual world. Venuti's preference is unambiguous: he regards domestication, particularly as practised in Anglophone publishing, as a form of cultural violence, an erasure of difference that flatters the receiving culture's sense that its own language is a transparent, unmarked norm against which all others are measured.

But the domesticating-foreignising distinction, for all its influence, imports its own assumption: that fidelity is fundamentally a property of surface texture, of how much friction the target text retains. An older and in some ways more demanding tradition, associated with the philosopher-translator Walter Benjamin, located fidelity somewhere else entirely—not in texture but in what Benjamin called the work's "intention," the particular way of meaning that a text's original language makes possible. On this view, a translation succeeds not by imitating the source's syntax but by finding, in the resources of the target language, an analogous mode of meaning, even where the resulting sentence looks nothing like the original. Benjamin's famous, admittedly mystical image was of fragments of a broken vessel: translation and original are not identical, and cannot be made identical, but each is a fragment recognisable as belonging to the same vessel, "detectable" in outline though not reproducible in substance.

These competing accounts are not merely academic. A translator deciding how to render a pun, a piece of wordplay in which the joke depends on a coincidence between two unrelated meanings sharing one sound in the source language, cannot satisfy Venuti's foreignising ideal and Benjamin's fidelity-of-intention simultaneously except by extraordinary luck: preserving the source's exact words yields an untranslatable joke, while inventing a new pun in the target language, one that works on entirely different words, arguably preserves the text's comic intention while abandoning any claim to textural fidelity. Which choice counts as more faithful depends entirely on which theory of fidelity one has already accepted, which is precisely the point: translation theory does not resolve the translator's dilemmas so much as it clarifies what, exactly, is being sacrificed by any given choice, and forces that sacrifice into view rather than allowing it to pass unnoticed as a merely technical decision.