By Way of Theoretical Introduction

Translation remains subject to multiple abuse, not least in terms of reception and understanding, by readers and critics who see the act of translation as the re-creation of an invariant truth or truths contained within the textual boundaries of the original, and who therefore think of the product of that process as linked to the original through a paradigm of sameness. Equivalence is taken here at face value, with the result that any formal or semantic deviation is, at best, regarded as a necessary evil and, at worst, chastised as a wilful perversion. These observations may be considered a well-rehearsed impertinence by some, or, by others, a simple defence of translation as an interpretative act. Every act of translation, of course, is rooted in the search for equivalence; but if we accept the notion of translation as a hermeneutic process whose method is interpretative rather than an act of close-reading which furnishes, in I. A. Richards's item of philological faith, the “complete viewing” of text (249), then the paradigm of equivalence that emerges is one that is multiple—in other words, one that is subject to, as well as the consequence of, a range of applied interpretative choices and decisions. In that regard, any commission or skopos, in the sense of applying a variable purpose to the act of translation, are in themselves interpretative acts in that they propose differentiated versions of the same original text: translations that are one possible version among many, and that are arrived at through choices whose determinants may be both conscious and unconscious, more deeply embedded in this latter case within the black-box of the translator's mind. Effectively, while every translator seeks equivalence, it is usually only equivalence of a kind, because those theatre translators whose work emerges from creative engagement with text, whose process is the writing forward of the quality of their reading experience, will understand that any strategy of equivalence emerges from both the complexity of the translator's lived experience, cumulative and current, ongoing and everchanging, and from the ways in which the travelling text connects with that experience.