Translation Is Always an Improvement

The rejection of natural neutrality makes it possible to address several thorny questions commonly avoided by the ethics of anonymity. The most important of these problems is the translator's right or duty to improve originals. Since translators cannot help but take position - since even neutral positions have to be created -, their ethics should break with passive non-identity, forcing them actively to evaluate the texts they work on, making them take on a major degree of responsibility for the texts they produce.

The question of improving a text concerns various domains.

The real problem begins on the level which is described as "monitoring the quality of the writing" as well as the monitoring of pertinence, relations between implicit and explicit material, and strategies of addition and deletion.

Translational improvement thus initially means enabling a text to reach certain receivers who would otherwise find that text unavailable or incomprehensible. In certain cases this requires that improvement passes through the reproduction of defects, so that the original text or author may be recognised as defective and thereafter be avoided or corrected in future texts. To translate is not always to correct; but it is always to attempt improvement, sometimes according to a long-term vision.

On this level, improvement is obviously a very relative notion; it is always in terms of the specific purposes of the person or group interested in creating a new "we", in extending reception in a certain direction (and not in others). The pertinent question is then not whether the translator should improve a transferred text, but according to whose criteria improvements should be made.