medium · Enhanced ACT reading
Adapted from an essay on translation.
The amateur translator dreams of transparency: a pane of glass through which the original passes unaltered. The professional knows there is no glass, only a second window with a frame and a tint of its own, and that her task is not to erase the frame—which cannot be done—but to choose it well. A faithful translation, in this view, is not the one that adds least but the one that adds visibly, in a direction the author would have owned. The amateur, straining to disappear, smuggles in his own habits unawares; the professional, having given up disappearing, can at least be deliberate about what she leaves behind.
The central distinction the essay draws between the amateur and the professional translator is that the professional:
- accepts that she inevitably alters the original and therefore aims to shape those alterations deliberately rather than deny them.
- adds less to the original than the amateur does, having trained herself to intrude on the author's voice as little as possible.
- believes a translation can achieve true transparency provided the translator suppresses her personal habits and tastes.
- refuses to translate any text whose frame cannot be matched exactly to the tint of the original author's style.
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