The Sources of the Translation Improvement

Since the question of improvement can be formulated as a classical problem of multiply divided loyalties, it may be conceptualised in terms of the figures to which the translator might turn when in search of authorisation. There are at least five such figures:

- the author or sender, whose consent might be necessary for alterations (as stated in the translator’s code of ethics);

- the receiver, who might have a right to know about the defects of the original;

- the client or initiator who might demand that the translation be written in accordance with a specific aim or purpose;

- the ST culture, since even the most disastrous poverty or iniquitous domination might have the right to treatment in terms of a regime of cultural equality (a 1982 UNESCO text advises member countries that "international cultural cooperation depends on respect for cultural identity, for the dignity and value of each culture, for independence, for national sovereignty and for non-intervention");

- the TT culture, since translation has the potential to alter the defensive capabilities of the receiving community and the long-term expressive capacities of the receiving language.

Of these five possible sources of authority for improvement, which is to have priority? And if there is no absolute priority, how, in any given situation, might translators know in which of these directions they should look first?

Several short-sighted solutions should be dispensed with before a general answer can be given.

First, although the ideal translation might be thought to be one in which all these parties would find visible improvement, the ideal of equivalence suggests exactly the opposite, namely that what these parties are primarily interested in is invisible improvement of the kind that can be mistaken for zero-degree value change. From the translator's point of view, to translate is to improve. But from the perspective of authors, clients, receivers and cultures, what we are calling translation is the production of equivalence. No one really wants to know about the translator's value added; few are automatically prepared to let unknown and potentially untrustworthy individuals decide what is or is not an improvement, especially when those individuals start to reveal their ignorance by asking clients too many questions. The more the translator manifests his or her individuality, the less chance equivalence has of finding believers. The improvements most likely to suite all parties are thus those made by silent hands, leaving fragile translational fictions untouched.

Second, it might be assumed that the fairest kind of improvement is that which is most explicit. The best translation would then be one in which nothing is hidden from the receiver, all problems are elaborated, all original defects are noted and expansion is worked up to the outer threshold of relative equivalence.

Third, an ethics of commercial service, most effectively based on the translator's responsibility to the client's purpose, would simply place mercenary behaviour beyond the reach of ethical critique, suggesting that the most improved translation is the one which gets paid the most and that none of the other possible sources of authority count for anything at all.

Fourth, an ethics based on symmetrical respect for hypothetical cultural equality would seem inadequate to the fundamentally asymmetric principles of translation itself: authors and translators are by definition not equal; text flows between senders and receivers are rarely balanced or reciprocal; the right to information is not automatically a universal blessing. An ethics of improvement must recognise that translation is a profoundly asymmetrical phenomenon.

Fifth, an ethics based on asymmetrical cultural specificity would in fact fare no better than its symmetrical counterpart.

There can be no doubt that certain phenomena are culture-specific. But translation, precisely because it is an intercultural phenomenon, should not be one of them. Translators have always been intercultural.

Questions of divided loyalty cannot be decided in terms of looking in one direction rather than another. Criteria of equivalence, explicitness, purpose-adequacy, hypothetical cultural equality and cultural specificity fail to provide any convincing orientation as to the general nature of translational improvement. This is because they are not in themselves translational criteria; they are not derived from any careful contemplation of what translation is and does. In order properly to decide how and when to improve through translation, one must first position oneself in an appropriately intercultural space, and only then consider the fortunes of individual senders, receivers, clients or cultures.