Fidelity and Transparency

The concept of fidelity and transparency

Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic, Gilles Ménage, coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.

The concept of fidelity and transparency

Fidelity pertains to the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning, and otherwise without distorting it.

Transliteration with machine translation comes closest to this school of thought, with the caveat that it usually fails to properly convey the message because of its rigid faithfulness to the original document

The concept of fidelity and transparency

Transparency pertains to the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.

The translation caters to native speakers and the target audience, such that idiomatic, syntactic, and grammatical conventions are followed while cultural, political, and social context is kept in mind at all times. Adaptation and localization comes closest to this school of thought, with the caveat that a bit of sacrifice in terms of the intended message will inevitably happen whenever translators use this approach in their translation

The concept of fidelity and transparency

A few simple examples should illustrate some of the choices and strategies that translators need to make, which confer them a voice in the resulting translation, together with a brief explanation of the process of selecting a particular strategy. In the localization project of a British software license reselling company introducing their services in Spain, which involved the translation of their website and related documentation, the translator decided to keep a number of IT references in English (software, hardware, type of licenses). In translational terms, this would be seen as a foreignizing strategy, or the use of source text loan words in the target text. However, the translator was aware of the acceptance of some of this terminology by the Real Academia Española (the authority in Spanish language matters)

The concept of fidelity and transparency

and the perceived preference in Spain of English terms in dealing with IT topics. In the translation of the home page, “Are you taking advantage of the current exchange rate?” was rendered as “ Aproveche la actual cotización de la libra esterlina”. This is an example of transposition, where the interrogative sentence was changed into an imperative one, reflecting a more direct style preferred by Spanish speakers. In another section, the webpage referred to software licensing procurement explaining the process of insolvency of British companies, including terms such as insolvency practitioners and case managers. This required the adaptation not only of the specific terminology but also of the process of company insolvencies in Spain in order to successfully communicate the operational issues involved in the procurement of licenses.

Are you taking advantage of the current exchange

rate?

Aproveche la actual cotización de la libra

esterlina

Take advantage of the current price of

sterling

English• please, buy me a bottle of sunflower oil in the retail store

Filipino• mangyaring, bumili ako ng isang bote ng langis mirasol sa tingian tindahan

The concept of fidelity and transparency

One final situation where a reader is aware of the presence of the translator is bad translations.

In this example of reverse translation, it is obvious that the process of recoding suffers from a lack of knowledge of the TL and the reader is well aware that s/he is reading the words of the “translator.”

“Please, buy me a bottle of sunflower oil in retail stores”

“Mangyaring, bumili ako ng isang bote ng langis mirasol sa mga tindahang”

In all these examples--even in the last one--the purpose behind the selection and application of translation strategies by the translator is to produce a TT that “respects the norms of the target language, that has vis à vis sentence structure, terminology, cohesion of the text and fidelity to the author and his/her intention" (CIOL 2006:16). Venuti (1995), though, goes further and states that nowadays a TT is deemed acceptable by readers, publishers and reviewers when there is an absence of foreign linguistic or stylistic peculiarities and it reads fluently in the TL. The Chartered Institute of Linguists (2006:12) seem to prove this point, as in their criteria for assessing translations “reading like a piece originally written in the target language” is regarded as what translators should aim for when producing a TT.

However, Venuti warns us (1995), the more fluent a translation is the more invisible the translator becomes. Schaffner (1999:61) believes that the expectation is that the translator will produce “a faithful reproduction, a reliable duplicate or a quality replica" of the ST that is as good as reading the original, thus rendering the translator “transparent.” This shows a trust in the integrity of the translator and in his/her capability to produce a text that is as good as the real thing and without whom intercultural communication would not be possible (Hermans 1996). Interestingly, however, the expectation also is that a TT is most successful when it is not obvious that it is a translation, requiring the translator not to leave any trace of his work (Schaffner 1999:62).

So it could be argued that, on the one hand, the translator is--or should be--regarded as the central piece allowing communication between languages and cultures to take place and that a translation is deemed good when it reads as fluently as if it was written originally in the TL. On the other hand, however, for this to take place it is necessary that the translator stays as invisible and quiet as possible, so that his/her choices and strategies when producing the text are not apparent and the reader is not aware of them. Thus, a translation is good when it does not read like a translation and when it produces the impression of being an original.

Citations

. - See more at: http://www.onehourtranslation.com/translation/blog/fidelity-versus-transparency-translation#sthash.SZyQ2FZQ.dpuf

http://www.translationjournal.net/journal/62xparency.htm

http://top100opinions.com/2011/07/fidelity-transparency-translation/

https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/Mangyaring%2C%20bumili%20ako%20ng%20isang%20bote%20ng%20langis%20mirasol%20sa%20mga%20tindahang