Translating the Untranslatable:

The Translator's Aesthetic, Ideological

and Political Responsibility1
Gillian Lane-Mercier
McGill University

Abstract: Translation scholars have recently emphasized the importance of the

translator's (in)visibility (Venuti) and of the ethical aim of translation (Berman).
This paper argues that a) the translation of literary sociolects is paradigmatic of
the way in which the translator's visibility is foregrounded within the target text;
b) their translation requires a "visible" engagement on the part of the translator
which is grounded in an ethics of translation, thus leading beyond the visible/
invisible dichotomy implied by Venuti and the positive/negative ethics dichotomy
set up by Berman; c) the comments made by numerous translation scholars
concerning the problems raised by literary sociolects reflect some of the contra-
dictions besetting contemporary translation theory.
Résumé: Les spécialistes de la traduction ont récemment souligné l'importance
de l'invisibilité du traducteur (Venuti) et de la visée éthique de la traduction
(Berman). Cet article expose trois thèses: (a) la traduction des sociolectes
littéraires qualifie la manière dont la visibilité du traducteur s' exprime au sein du
texte-cible; (b) leur traduction nécessite de la part du traducteur un engagement
patent et ancré dans une éthique de la traduction, dépassant aussi bien la
dichotomie entre visibilité et invisibilité (Venuti) que celle entre une éthique
négative et positive (Berman); (c) les commentaires des spécialistes concernant
les problèmes soulevés par les sociolectes littéraires révèlent quelques-unes des
contradictions sous-jacentes aux théories contemporaines de la traduction.

Introduction

Few contemporary translation theorists would dispute the now well estab-
lished fact that translation at once reproduces and generates meaning by way
of what could be called the dual dialectics of fidelity and transformation, on

Target 9:1 (1997), 43–68. DOI 10.1075/target.9.1.041an

ISSN 0924–1884 / E-ISSN 1569–9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
44 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

the one hand, and of loss and gain, on the other. However, opinions tend to
differ on a variety of related questions, such as the very definition of the
concept of fidelity, the nature of the transformations that inevitably occur, the
types of meanings that are lost and/or gained, and, finally, the status and role
of the translator.
In this paper I should like to touch, in one way or another, on all four of
the above questions in an effort to contribute to the ongoing debate over the
specificity of the translation process. Insofar as this process involves the re-
placement of "the chain of signifiers that constitutes the source-language text
. . . by a chain of signifiers in the target language which the translator provides
on the strength of an interpretation" (Venuti 1995: 17), it is ostensibly con-
cerned with the loss and gain of semantic meaning. However if, as Gideon
Toury (see 1980; 1981; 1982) persuasively argued in a series of ground-
breaking articles, translation is to be construed both as a discursive, social,
cultural practice and as a norm governed, decision-oriented, strategic activity,
and if, as Lawrence Venuti has stressed, it is "a cultural political practice,
constructing or critiquing ideology-stamped identities for foreign cultures,
affirming or transgressing discursive values and institutional limits in the
target-language culture" (1995: 19), it follows that the translation process
produces not only semantic meaning, but also aesthetic, ideological and
political meaning. Such meaning is indicative, amongst other things, of the
translator's position within the socio-ideological stratifications of his or her
cultural context, of the values, beliefs, images and attitudes circulating within
this context, of the translator's interpretation of the source text as well as of his
or her aesthetic, ideological and political agendas, and of the interpretive
possibilities made available to the target-text readers through the translator's
strategies and decisions.
My hypothesis can therefore be formulated as follows: not only is the
translator's presence irreducibly inscribed within the target text, but the pro-
cess of translation can be seen as an ethical practice that engages, over and
above the translator's semantic responsibility, his or her aesthetic, ideological
and political responsibility. While this hypothesis is to a large extent indebted
to Lawrence Venuti's (1986; 1992; 1995) notion of the translator's (in)-
visibility and to Antoine Berman's (1984; 1985a; 1985b; 1995) notion of the
ethical aim of translation, I hope to show that it ultimately leads to a reconsid-
eration of such notions, calling into question the binary oppositions upon
which they are founded and the axiological framework they imply.
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 45

To illustrate my hypothesis, I have chosen to focus on some of the

problems encountered in the translating of literary sociolects as they appear in
prose narratives. Indeed, the problems they raise elucidate and corroborate
Venuti's statement concerning
the violence that resides in the very purpose and activity of translation . . . .
Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference
of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language
reader. This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but it
necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities — and an
exorbitant gain of other possibilities specific to the translating language. . . .
translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities
for foreign cultures, and hence . . . potentially figures in ethnic discrimination,
geopolitical confrontations, colonialism, terrorism, war. (1995: 18-19)

Given the cultural stereotypes, identity constructions and power relations

reflected and refracted by literary sociolects, their translation can be seen as
paradigmatic of the manner in which a "violent" meaning-producing aes-
thetic, ideological and political engagement is required on the part of the
translating subject — one which is grounded in an ethics of translation and
which implies a certain type of visibility: as Antoine Berman remarks, "[l]e
traducteur a tous les droits dès lors qu'il joue franc jeu" (1995: 93), that is, as
long as he or she assumes responsibility for the relation(s) to and the image(s)
of both the cultural Other and the cultural Self that his or her translation
choices, decisions, and strategies institute.2 Furthermore, I hope to show that
the case of literary sociolects can be seen as paradigmatic of the contradictions
besetting contemporary translation theory in general, in that they tend to
crystallize the ideological "blind spots" which underlie many post-structural-
ist accounts of the translation process.

1. The Concept of Literary Sociolect

1.1. Literary Sociolects as Textual Constructs

First, however, I should like to define what I mean by literary sociolect. The
concept of literary sociolect is construed here as the textual representation of
"non-standard" speech patterns that manifest both the socio-cultural forces
which have shaped the speaker's linguistic competence and the various socio-
cultural groups to which the speaker belongs or has belonged. As a rule, these
46 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

non-standard patterns appear in the direct discourse of one or several charac-

ters, whose phonetic, syntactic, lexical and/or semantic configurations are
thus set off, usually (but certainly not always) in a negative or derogatory
mode, from the socially "neutral", linguistically "correct" discourse of the
narrator and, as the case may be, of other characters. Generally speaking, these
"deviant" speech patterns are both highly stereotypical, based on commonly
shared, easily recognizable assumptions of socio-cultural and linguistic differ-
ences, and more or less stylized, containing a limited quantity o f carefully
selected sociolectal markers designed to ensure that neither the intelligibility
nor the readability of the dialogues is impeded.
As a result, while many — sometimes all — of these markers may well
characterize real-world sociolects, thereby engendering highly powerful mi-
metic effects, literary sociolects can by no stretch of the imagination be
qualified as authentic, non-mediated reproductions of their extratextual coun-
terparts. Concerns of mimesis, fidelity and authenticity are subordinated to
stylistic, thematic and diegetic concerns, for traditionally novelists have em-
ployed non-standard linguistic patterns to achieve comic relief, picturesque-
ness, or the illusion of sociolinguistic and cultural realism, using extratextual
speech phenomena to suit their aesthetic project. Literary sociolects should
therefore be considered as motivated textual constructs whose mimetic power
usually works to naturalize the selection process from which they derive, the
literary norms to which they are subject, the transformations they inevitably
undergo and the specific aesthetic aims they serve.

1.2. Literary Sociolects as Ideological and Pragmatic Constructs

This having been said, it is a well known fact that any given aesthetic project is
encoded with ideologically determined values. Far from constituting a neutral
operation, both the stylization process to which literary sociolects are exposed
and the comic, picturesque or realistic effects they generate involve the
authorial manipulation of real-world class determinations, ethnic and gender
images, power structures, relations of hierarchy and exclusion, cultural stereo-
types and institutional roles. What is at stake is not so much linguistic
difference, as the social and cultural representations of the Other that linguistic
difference invariably presupposes, as well as the underlying antagonisms,
interests and power struggles upon which such representations are con-
structed. As Roland Barthes so aptly observes,
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 47

le champ sociolectal est défini . . . par sa division, sa sécession inexpiable, et

c'est dans cette division que l'analyse doit prendre place. Il s'ensuit que la
recherche sociolectale . . . ne peut être commencée sans un acte initial,
fondateur, d' évaluation. . . . évaluer . . . n'est pas une conduite "libérale",
mais bien au contraire violente; l'évaluation sociolectale, dès l'origine, vit le
conflit de groupes et de langages. (1984: 127-128)
In this perspective, the representation of sociolects, defined as a "violent"
evaluative "order of behavior", simultaneously attests to the author's own
sociolinguistic positioning and foregrounds his or her ideological and political
agenda. Just as the linguistic mimetism of literary sociolects is constantly
undermined by aesthetic determinations, their socio-ideological mimetism is
consistently relativized by the manner in which the author mediates, within
the realm of the text, the assumptions and images, the power (im)balances and
the identity constructions inscribed in their extratextual "models". It is there-
fore necessary to look beyond the aesthetic effects created by the representa-
tion, for instance, of rural speech so as to consider the authorial values and
attitudes (condescendence? distance? respect? solidarity? subversion?) they
presuppose.
Moreover, the representation of sociolects imposes on the reader, by the
sheer "violence" of their textual presence, a grid of axiological and ideological
formations which he or she can accept or reject, adhere to or resist via his or
her own evaluative reading agenda. As a consequence, while literary so-
ciolects can be defined as textual constructs, they must also be seen as the
textual locus par excellence for the deployment of writing and reading strate-
gies whose aim is to incarnate, in conjunction with specific ideological and
political aims, the socio-cultural identity of fictitious speakers presented as
positive or negative, or both positive and negative cultural Others. Just as
literary sociolects give visibility to the plurilinguism that disrupts and invali-
dates the supposed unity of national languages and dominant ideologies, they
perturb the supposed unity of narrative discourse, introducing discursive
ruptures and discontinuities that "imitate" or transform real-world linguistic
and social phenomena, confronting the reader with a variety of socially
determined voices and interpretive possibilities.
48 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

1.3. The Translation of Literary Sociolects as Paradigmatic of the

Translation Process in General

In light of the preceding remarks, the homology I wish to postulate between

the translation of literary sociolects and the translation process as a whole
should seem more readily acceptable. On the level of the source text, literary
sociolects are saturated with authorial presence and contain extremely power-
ful reading positions; as such, they are a product not so much of a mimetic
practice grounded in (illusory) questions of fidelity and transparency, as of a
rhetorical practice of mimesis that aims to orient (or disorient) the reader by
generating aesthetic, ideological and political meaning via the manipulation
of extratextual sociolinguistic units (see Lane-Mercier 1995a; 1995b). This
meaning is necessarily a function of the "initial founding act of evaluation",
the responsibility for which is the author's and the violence of which is akin to
that of the translation process as described by Venuti (1995).
On the level of the target text, translated literary sociolects are saturated
with the presence of the translating subject, whose own violent "initial found-
ing act of evaluation" has replaced that of the source-text author. The result is,
on the one hand, the creation of aesthetic, ideological and political meaning
that inevitably encodes target-language images and beliefs with respect to the
cultural Other, thus reflecting the translator's position within the socio-ideo-
logical and sociolinguistic divisions of his or her context, his or her attitude in
relation to the "foreignness" connoted by sociolects and their speakers, as well
as the ethical stance implied by his or her translation strategies, and, on the
other hand, the creation of reader positions which coincide only partially, if at
all, with those of the source text.
The translation of literary sociolects entails a twofold violence, one that is
inherent, as we have just seen, in the representation of socially marked
linguistic configurations, the other that is inherent in the translation process
itself. On this view, the translation of literary sociolects would indeed appear
to be paradigmatic of the manner in which the translator supplements, deletes,
transforms, subverts, parodies source-text meaning by way of specific transla-
tion strategies, confirming not only the violence of the translation process
which is always already a "forcible" transformation of the source text, but also
the translator's inevitable presence within the translated text. As Barbara
Folkart has so pertinently demonstrated, "[o]n . . . traduit toujours par intérêt.
. . . On ne saurait de ce fait ré-énoncer sans y mettre du sien" (1991: 14).
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 49

2. Translating Literary Sociolects: An Impossible Task?

It should therefore come as no surprise that for translators literary sociolects

represent, at worst, a well-defined zone of untranslatability and, at best, an
opaque, resistant textual component whose translation is fraught with an
inordinate number of meaning losses and gains — to the extent that both the
concept and the possibility of fidelity to the source text are rendered null and
void while the conditions of possibility of the translation act are called into
question. In this respect, the following sampling of recent comments made by
translation scholars is most instructive, for not only do they tend to draw
conclusions as to the impossibility of translating literary sociolects, but they
put forth arguments implicitly or explicitly reactivating the very assumptions
of fidelity to and transparence of source-text meaning that post-structuralist
approaches to translation have sought to combat in favour of the recognition
of translation as a meaning-producing process.

2.1. The Risk of Meaning Creation

Accordingly, while Henry Schogt admits that "the Scottish Highlands form a
good counterpart for the [French] Massif Central" (1988: 124), he immedi-
ately adds that
translating dialect features of the speech of a peasant from the Massif Central
by particularities of English spoken by Highlanders is risky, because the
English reader tends to have precise associations with that dialect that would
be disturbing in a French setting. (ibid.)

The same risk underlies the translation into English of the Acadian French
transcribed by the Canadian writer Antonine Maillet in her novel La Sagouine:
on the one hand, writes Schogt, "a comparable, equally strictly localized
English dialect [would have] the . . . drawback of calling forth special
associations that clash with the setting of the original" (1988: 125); on the other
hand, the solution effectively opted for by Maillet's English translator, who
replaces her regionally marked dialect by "a very colloquial and substandard
English" is "not completely satisfactory because La Sagouine's language,
which is such an important part of her personality, comes very close to that of
Holden Caulfield in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye" (1988: 125).
In a similar vein, Doris Kadish observes that while Louise Belloc's
French translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin attempts to respect the black dialect
50 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

depicted in the original, together with the abolitionist stance it is meant to

signify, it "actually intensifies the implicit racist overtones of the original"
(1994: 59) by rendering it more ungrammatical and more stereotypical, and by
adding "the seme of animality". Schogt and Kadish rightly underscore the
effects such translation choices have on the linguistic, cultural, ideological
and political meaning of the target text; however, not only do they express
negative qualification of these effects so as to suggest that these meanings
should be avoided and that more "satisfactory", more "faithful" solutions
ought to be sought, but they prudently refrain from proposing such solutions
themselves, thus leaving the problem intact.

2.2. The Risk of Meaning Loss

Instead of focusing on the "risk" of creating "disturbing associations" for the

target-text readers, Sherry Simon emphasizes the loss incurred during the
translation process of ideological, political and pragmatic meaning conveyed
by the literary use of a "substandard" Montréal sociolect known as joual,
together with the inevitable political and cultural ramifications of this loss.
Joual, which is heavily punctuated with English words, was used by many
politically involved Québec novelists and playwrights during the 1960s and
70s in an effort to contest, from the standpoint of an anti-colonial cultural
agenda, the hegemony of Parisian written French within the Québec literary
institution. Its representation in literary works was therefore to be appre-
hended as a deliberately anti-establishment, militant, terrorist act destined to
evoke the politically charged situation prevailing at the time as well as to
shake the Québecois reader into an awareness of Québec's cultural identity
and, correlatively, its linguistic and cultural alienation.
Needless to say, the sheer weight of such political and cultural overtones
presents a daunting challenge to translators; worse yet,
one could almost say that untranslatability was inscribed in [joual] through
the very presence of English words [. . . which] is inevitably interpreted as
more than a simple transcription of popular language: it points to a complex
mixture of domination and appropriation . . . . (Simon 1992: 171)

Simon quite rightly sees this problem as a political and an ethical one, for by
"rerouting" those English words back into English "the Quebec text becomes
assimilated into English-Canadian literature" (Mezei, quoted by Simon 1992:
172) and its transgressive mission is rendered inoffensive if not simply inexis-
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 51

tent. Her conclusion is understandably pessimistic: the translation of joual "is

doomed to partial failure. . . . the aggressive clash of alterities represented in
the various literary idioms known as joual must . . . remain a problem for
translation. Such was its intention and meaning" (1992: 172) — a conclusion
which, while it dismisses questions of fidelity, nonetheless presupposes the
pertinence, however problematic, of questions of equivalence.

2.3. The Risk of Ethnocentricity

Taking a rather different approach, Antoine Berman's critique of the use of

Parisian slang to translate the lunfardo of Buenos Aires is nothing short of
scathing: "[u]ne telle exotisation, qui rend l'étranger du dehors par celui du
dedans, n'aboutit qu'à ridiculiser l'original" (1985a: 78). This remark appears
in the context of what Berman terms a negative analytic of translation,
designed to denounce the thirteen deforming tendencies that, while they are
always at work, are especially characteristic of "les traductions ethnocen-
triques, annexionnistes, et les traductions hyper-textuelles (pastiche, imita-
tion, adaptation, recréation libre)" (1985a: 69) which historically constitute
the dominant translation practice.
According to Berman, only a translation practice centred on the letter of
the source text, that is, its linguistic, stylistic, structural specificity, its other-
ness, can counter and neutralize both the ethnocentrism endemic to Western
translations and the deforming, hypertextual tendencies it encourages, thus
leading the way to a positive analytic. In this perspective, literary sociolects
would no longer be systematically occulted, ennobled, vulgarized or exoti-
cized. Instead, translators would attempt to respect their formal particularities,
searching for solutions based not on equivalence (". . . remplacer un idiotisme
par son 'équivalent' est un ethno-centrisme . . . . Traduire n'est pas chercher
des équivalences" (1985a: 79)), but rather on a foreignizing strategy designed
to "accueillir l'Etranger comme Etranger" (1985a: 68) and to enrich the target
language.
This staunchly anti-annexionist standpoint is nonetheless undermined by
the following remark: "Malheureusement, le vernaculaire, collant au terroir,
résiste à toute traduction directe dans un autre vernaculaire. Seules les langues
'cultivées' peuvent s'entre-traduire" (1985a: 78) — a rather astonishing,
patently elitist conceptual about-face that not only affirms the inherent un-
translatability of literary sociolects due to their "substandard", "uncultivated"
52 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

status, but clearly reveals one of the fundamental contradictions of contempo-

rary thinking about translation, whereby the myth of transparency, equiva-
lence and fidelity surreptitiously reasserts itself, despite consistent efforts to
denounce and banish it once and for all.

2.4. The Risk of Unauthenticity

A similar conceptual contradiction underlies Barbara Folkart's account of the

problems raised by the translation of literary sociolects.3 Indeed, keeping in
mind Folkart's extremely insightful definition of the translation process
quoted above, one cannot but question the theoretical assumptions upon
which her account is based. Folkart begins by explicitly anchoring her doubts
as to the feasibility of translating sociolects in issues of sociolinguistic equiva-
lence and authenticity:
la ré-énonciation de 1'"écriture parlée", que celle-ci mobilise un sociolecte ou
un dialecte, pose le problème fort complexe de l'homologation des univers
sociolinguistiques La traduction se heurte donc à la quasi-impossibilité de
réactualiser les valeurs à la fois sémiotiques et pragmatiques véhiculées par
l'écriture lectale. . . . D'où le problème classique: par quel parler du système
d'arrivée remplacer le parler de départ? (1991: 177-178)
Confronted with problems of such magnitude, the translator almost invariably
chooses a highly stylized, stereotyped, artificial rendering of the source-text
sociolect(s): "un parler plus ou moins authentique . . . finit par se dégrader en
parler inauthentique" (1991: 180). While Folkart most certainly sheds light on
the linguistic and aesthetic transformations generated through translation, she
implicitly revalidates the traditional dichotomy between the authenticity of the
source text and the unauthentic, derivative status of the target text which
strives, unsuccessfully, to reproduce source-text meaning and authorial inten-
tion.
Her subsequent comments on the "more interesting" case in which, "face
au parler authentique du texte de départ, le polysystème d'arrivée présente une
case vide" (1991: 181), circumvent this dichotomy, however. In view of the
two choices available to the translator, who may either produce a translation
completely devoid of sociolectal markers or invent a fictitious sociolect and
"rester 'fidèle' au texte à un niveau autre que celui de l'authenticité socio-
linguistique" (1991: 183), what is at stake is no longer the issue of authenticity
or equivalence but rather that of motivation:
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 53

dans la mesure où la littérature est mise en forme, on peut se demander si l'on

y rencontre jamais des parlers tout à fait authentiques . . . . [L]e problème
ontologique de l'authenticité débouche sur celui, fonctionnel, de l'intégration
de l'écriture parlée aux structures signifiantes de l'œuvre, bref, sur le pro-
blème de la motivation. (1991: 183)
The ensuing relativization of the mimetic dimension of literary sociolects,
translated or not, allows for the foregrounding of their aesthetic, functional
dimension and thus opens a space, however small, for the positive analytic
envisioned by Berman. Unfortunately, Folkart later reintroduces the tradi-
tional distinction between the "plénitude" of source-text meaning and the
diminished nature of translated text meaning when she criticizes the replace-
ment of the Irish brogue used by James Joyce in Ulysses by Picard, a dialect
from northwestern France:
Le parler du texte d'arrivée, moins authentique, moins cohérent, plus artificiel
que celui de l'original, est avant tout plus arbitraire, moins viscéralement
motivé c'est que le dialecte ne revêt, ni pour [l]e traducteur, ni pour l'œuvre
traduite, le même caractère denécessité interne que pour l'auteur et pour le texte
de départ. C'est par cette perte de motivation, autant ou plus que par la perte
d'authenticité, que passe la marge de ré-énonciation. (1991: 186-187)4
On one level, Folkart makes an extremely important point. Whatever option
the translator chooses to translate literary sociolects, a disparity is created
between the source and target texts, one which generates aesthetic meaning,
marks the intervention of the translating subject and attests to the alterity of the
translated text. But on another level, while it ostensibly deals with questions of
aesthetic motivation, this point is implicitly grounded in an ideological system
that attributes positive value to the notions of transparency, authenticity and
fidelity. The resistance of literary sociolects to such notions can only be
conceived in negative terms and ultimately leads to the tacit acknowledge-
ment of their fundamental untranslatability. Folkart's use of the example of
literary sociolects at once corroborates and negates her central thesis of
translation as a meaning-producing, acculturating, manipulative, re-enuncia-
tive process, once again drawing attention to the way in which contemporary
translation theorists reintegrate the very concepts they wish to reject.

2.5. The Risk of Conservatism and/or Radicalism

One last example. While André Lefevere shares Folkart's basic assumptions,
he attributes greater importance to the influence of target-language ideological
54 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

and poetological constraints on translation decisions:

Ideology and poetics particularly shape the translator's strategy in solving
problems raised by elements in the Universe of Discourse of the original and
the linguistic expression of that original. . . . Perhaps the link between
ideology on the one hand and strategies for solving Universe of Discourse and
linguistic problems on the other is nowhere as obvious as in the justifications
used by translators to maintain in their translations some of the linguistic and
cultural differentiations [an author] uses in the original. (1992: 48)
Lefevere cites as an example the deviant Greek Aristophanes has his Dorian
characters speak so as to engender a comic effect. In two different English
translations this deviant Greek has been replaced with Scottish and Texan
speech — something, as Lefevere puts it, that "may not go over too well"
(1992: 49) in Scotland or Texas, for
[n]either translator stops to consider either the 'validity' of the stereotypes,
cultural mechanisms to 'affirm' the superiority of one subgroup over another,
or the possible anachronistic effect of the use of 'Scotch' or Texan in classical
Athens. (1992: 49)

This negative characterization of the use of modern, region-specific sociolects

to translate the Dorians' ancient, region-specific Greek seems to imply that no
target-language sociolect is acceptable. In what immediately follows, however,
Lefevere appears to contradict such an implication, indicating that solutions are
possible but must be defined as politically determined discursive strategies
which manifest the translator's socio-cultural positioning: "[d]ialects . . . tend
to reveal the translators' ideological stance toward certain groups thought of as
'inferior' or 'ridiculous', both inside their culture and outside" (1992: 58).
Two politically determined strategies exist: either the translator opts for a
"faithful" rendition of the source-text sociolects, reproducing in ungrammati-
cal, illogical English the grammatical and logical anomalies of the original and
resorting to explanatory notes to ensure reader comprehension, in which case
the translation can be seen as "conservative in both ideological and poetologi-
cal terms. [The translator] translates the way he does out of reverence for the
cultural prestige the original has acquired" (1992: 49-50); or, the translator
opts for the use of modern language and jargon to translate the linguistic
particularities of the original, in which case the translation can be seen as
ideologically and poetologically radical, as "subversive, designed to make the
reader question both the prestige of the source text and its 'received' interpre-
tation in both poetological and ideological terms" (1992: 50). In the first
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 55

instance, the (negatively construed) conservative rendition centred on the

"letter" of the text leads to the linguistic and cultural alienation of the target
text; in the second instance, the (positively construed) more radical rendition
centred on the target culture leads to the linguistic and cultural naturalization
of the source text.
This initial contradiction is informed by a second, more insidious one, for
Lefevere simultaneously condemns the ethnocentric, discriminatory, indeed
potentially racist practice of replacing source-text sociolects by "equivalent"
target-language sociolects, and condones the equally ethnocentric practice of
"modernizing" and acclimatizing ancient texts to target-culture values and
linguistic structures. Thus the "solutions" described by Lefevere are under-
mined, as in the case of Berman's and Folkart's analyses, by the reappearance
of the very essentialist notions (equivalence, accuracy) he seeks to dispose of.
These contradictions can be seen as symptomatic of some of the inconsis-
tencies riddling non-prescriptive approaches to translation, which pretend to
be "objective" while they are in fact grounded in an unavowed axio-ideologi-
cal framework, and which have a tendency to deny agency to the translating
subject. While Lefevere does state that translators can try to make a literary
work "fit their ideology by using all kinds of manipulative techniques" (1992:
44), thus stressing the undisputable presence of the translating subject within
the translated text, he systematically emphasizes the external determinations
shaping the translator's manipulative techniques. This explains the polarized
nature of his conservative vs radical dichotomy, which forecludes the possibil-
ity that the translator's aesthetic, ideological and/or political stance might be at
odds with the ideological and poetological determinations ostensibly shaping
his or her translation strategies.
In other words, given the forces of alienation and naturalization at work
in the target-language society, and given that the choice of a target-language
sociolect is at once a strategic one and one that reveals the translator's values
and attitudes, it follows that the same strategy (the use of Scottish to render the
Dorians' faulty Greek, for example) will be conservative or radical depending,
among other factors, on the translator's origins, socio-cultural positioning,
interpretation of the source-text sociolects, aesthetic, ideological and political
agenda (realist? ironic? designed to uphold/denounce cultural stereotypes?),
and the audience for whom the translation is intended. In the final analysis, the
inconsistencies in Lefevere's account of literary sociolects, the ambiguity of
his example (conservative? radical?) together with the dual axiologization of
56 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

ethnocentric translations (negative, positive) and the lack of any real recogni-
tion of the translator's agency, reflect the contradictions inherent not only in
certain target-oriented theories, but in the translation process per se.

2.6. Accepting the Risks

And here we have come full circle for, as stated earlier, literary sociolects
crystallize the problems and contradictions germane to translation defined as a
cultural political discursive activity that necessarily does "violence" to the
source text, rewriting it against or in accordance with target-culture values via
diverse meaning-producing manipulative strategies. Contemporary transla-
tion scholars who adopt such a definition nonetheless continue to posit the
untranslatability of certain source-text components due to the lack of a target-
language equivalent. The result, as we saw, is the implicit revalidation of
concepts supposedly de-essentialized by postmodern philosophy — such as
fidelity, untranslatability, origin — which are (re)incorporated into a series of
heavily axiologized binary oppositions — such as visibility vs invisibility,
ethnocentric vs foreignizing — that contradict the very epistemological foun-
dations of postmodernism and, I should like to add, of the translation act itself.
Literary sociolects bring into focus the "double standard" upon which
many current approaches to translation are based (equivalence, fidelity, au-
thenticity must be rejected — except in certain cases) and the dichotomies in
which they remain grounded. Moreover, not only do literary sociolects show
to what extent such dichotomies must be relativized, they also show to what
extent these dichotomies are inherent to, and presupposed by, the activity of
translation. In this sense, literary sociolects blatantly expose what translation
scholars tend to repress: translation is not an operation that entails either a
foreignizing strategy designed to contest hegemonic target-culture values or a
domesticating strategy designed to corroborate them; rather it is a contradic-
tory, dialectical process that engages at once questions of difference and
sameness, Self and Other, appropriation and resistance.
Each "dichotomy" must therefore be seen less in terms of mutually
exclusive opposites than in terms of translation strategies that may all come
into play, for different reasons, at different textual sites, with varying effects,
in the course of the translation process. And rather than systematically seeing
one pole as negative ("wrong", "bad") and the other as positive ("correct",
"good"), one must point to the historical variability and the potential inter-
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 57

changeability of the two poles. In other words, the translatable vs untranslat-

able dichotomy, together with the numerous other dichotomies it controls, are
inscribed within the translation process, where they must be reconceptualized
as historically determined strategies that receive their negative and/or positive
value in the context of a specific translation agenda.5

3. Toward an Ethics of Translation

In an attempt to expand on the preceding remarks, I should like to discuss at

greater length two of the dichotomies mentioned above: the invisibility vs the
visibility of the translator posited by Venuti and the negative vs the positive
analytic of translation posited by Berman. What I should like to focus more
closely on now, is that while the translator's presence is constantly signified
within the translated text in the form of multiple discursive strategies, it is also
inscribed in the form of an ethical framework which regulates and gives
meaning to these strategies.

3.1. Lawrence Venuti: The Invisibility vs the Visibility of the Translator

Venuti's dichotomy between the invisibility and the visibility of the translator
is by now well known. Put succinctly, by the invisibility of the translator, Venuti
means the use of fluent translation strategies aimed both at erasing the source
text's cultural and linguistic specificity so as to acclimatize it to the dominant
aesthetic, ideological and political values of the target language, and at promot-
ing the illusion of transparency, whereby the translated text accurately repro-
duces the source text's meaning. In this way, the translator carefully erases any
reference to or sign of the translation process so as to ensure that the translated
text reads as if it were an original. Conversely, by the translator's visibility,
Venuti means the use of strategies of resistance designed simultaneously to
uphold the source text's cultural and linguistic difference, to contest fluent
translation strategies and to reassert the translator's presence within the trans-
lated text.
While this scarcely does justice to the complexity of Venuti's hypothesis,
at first glance it provides for a way in which to conceptualize the solutions
available to translators faced with the problem of sociolects. Not only does it
avoid raising essentialist issues of equivalence and untranslatability, it recog-
58 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

nizes the role played by cultural and ideological determinations as well as the
translating subject's (conscious and unconscious) agency with respect to these
determinations. Thus, a translator who replaces the "outside foreigner by the
inside foreigner", or who replaces all sociolectal peculiarities of the original
with standard linguistic constructions, for example, adopts, in Venuti's terms,
a fluent strategy, one that is essentially domesticating in that it overtly encodes
the translated sociolect with target-language values, thereby presenting an
extremely high level of readability and acceptability.
On the other hand, a translator who strives to maintain the linguistic and
cultural specificity of the source-text sociolects by way of precise translation
strategies (the use of anachronisms, of deviant or marginal grammatical and
logical constructions, the highlighting of cultural heterogeneity, ambivalence
or discursive discontinuities, the "frustrating [of] ethnocentric expectations"
(1986: 207) etc.) adopts a resistant strategy, one that can be regarded as
foreignizing in that by patently going against dominant target-language aes-
thetic and ideological values (fluency, transparence), it respects the difference
of the source text, thereby presenting an often extremely high degree of un-
readability and unacceptability.
At second glance, however, the two categories are not so easily distin-
guishable, for if my hypothesis that literary sociolects invariably manifest the
translator's subjectivity is valid, both strategies reveal the presence of the
translating subject. As a consequence, Venuti's invisibility vs visibility di-
chotomy has limited theoretical viability, for what seems to hold for literary
sociolects can be seen to hold for the translation process as a whole. While it is
true that Venuti constantly reminds his readers that fluent strategies produce
the illusion of transparency, of the translator's invisibility and of the source
text's non-problematic insertion into the target culture, the nature of his
argument is such that he appears to fall prey to this very illusion, shifting from
the illusion of the translator's invisibility to the translator's invisibility per se
so as to be in a better position to attribute negative value to invisibility and
positive value to visibility.

3.2. Antoine Berman: The Negative vs the Positive Analytic of

Translation

Berman's conception of the translation process is on many accounts similar to

Venuti's. For Berman, the true task of translation is to offer the foreign text to
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 59

the reader in all its foreignness and the corresponding task of the translator is
to preserve the alterity of the source text which is inscribed not in its content
but rather in its letter. Hence the urgency of denouncing hypertextual prac-
tices, founded solely on the transmission of content and the acclimatization of
foreign texts to target-language aesthetic criteria, in favour of a "literal"
translation practice based on marginalized, "decentring", foreignizing tech-
niques destined at once to "neutralize" the ethnocentricity implied by hyper-
textuality, to accentuate the source text's "strangeness", to disturb the reader's
literary expectations as well as his or her cultural stereotypes and to expand
the target language's own linguistic and aesthetic possibilities. Like Venuti,
Berman accords positive value to "literal" practices that combat the histori-
cally dominant tendency of translation to annihilate the Other, qualifying as
"bad translations" those which do not (1984: 17).
This being said, two main differences can be found between Venuti's and
Berman's conception of translation. On the one hand, Berman makes explicit
what Venuti only suggests: such value judgements imply an ethics. But
whereas Venuti suggests that an external ethical code determines the
translator's choice of strategy, Berman maintains that an ethical dimension is
inherent to translation, constituting its very essence and thus regulating the
translation act from within, so to speak.6 According to Berman, one must
distinguish between a negative and a positive ethics of translation, from which
the related dichotomy between a hypertextual and a "literal" practice of
translation is derived.7 These dichotomies are essentialist in nature; indeed,
the deforming tendencies characteristic of ethnocentric practices only better
illustrate the fact that translation's "true essence", its "pure" ethical aim is to
oppose ethnocentricity, to "welcome the Foreigner as a Foreigner", "être
ouverture, dialogue, métissage, décentrement" (1984: 16), "établir un rapport
dialogique entre langue étrangère et langue propre" (1984: 23), by remaining
faithful to the source text's letter and respecting its fundamental alterity. These
dichotomies are also universalist in scope, for whereas translational norms are
historically and culturally determined, the ethnocentric deforming tendencies
are transcultural.
On the other hand, while Venuti stresses the influence of the receiving
culture, even in the case of foreignizing translations, Berman resolutely re-
fuses to consider a communication-oriented approach which, in his view,
would necessarily privilege the target reader and lead to the use of hyper-
textual, domesticating translation strategies (1985b: 85). His notion of an
60 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

ethics of translation is therefore source-oriented, "mimetic", entailing a redefi-

nition of the concept of fidelity: "good" translations imitate the source text's
corporality, its letter, thus restoring the innate ethical nature of translation as a
whole.
Once again, Berman's position provides a possible solution for the prob-
lem of literary sociolects — one that takes us beyond his own statement
concerning their untranslatability. Given that source-text sociolects constitute
highly visible sites of what could be termed internal foreignness which en-
hances the source text's own alterity, confronting the translator with fictional
Others that reinforce the text's Otherness, the ethical dimension inherent to the
translation act could be said to be incarnated by the ethical gesture of respect-
ing this internal foreignness. "Good" translations, ones grounded in a positive
ethics, must strive to maintain, even accentuate the "strangeness" of literary
sociolects without resorting, as in the case of "bad" translations, either to their
erasure or to the use of exoticizing or vulgarizing "equivalents".
At the same time, however, the example of literary sociolects unmasks
the theoretical inconsistency of Berman's dichotomies. For the inevitable
meaning losses and gains that accompany their translation and the inevitable
lack of correspondence they reveal between source-culture and target-culture
values, "muddy" the "pure" ethical aim of the "true" translation act, calling
into question the conditions of possibility of "faithful" translations, no matter
how hard the translator attempts to respect the foreignness of the source-text
sociolects.

3.3. Beyond Dualism

Venuti's and Berman's hypotheses are grounded in a dualistic — and insofar

as Berman is concerned, essentialist — conception of translation that, to my
mind, must be reconsidered. First, the notion of the translator's invisibility is
at variance with recent accounts by philosophers of language and, in the area
of translation studies, by theorists such as Folkart or Lefevere, whereby the
translator is never absent from his or her translation, even when he or she
resorts to strategies of fluency. The translator's invisibility is indeed a strate-
gic illusionary effect in that invisibility is simply occulted visibility and, as a
result, cannot lend itself to inclusion in a polarized dichotomy such as
Venuti's, just as domestication is "hidden foreignness" (Koskinen 1994: 451)
and cannot appear as the opposite of foreignness. Exactly the same critique
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 61

applies to Berman's overly rigid dichotomy between a negative and a positive

ethics of translation, as Berman himself seems to recognize when he states that
no translation can ever be totally free of deformations (1985a: 69); and that all
translators must take stock of both the letter and the content of the source text
("Toute traduction est, et doit être, restitution du sens" (1985a: 80)).
Second, while Venuti has every right to favour resistant strategies, his
description of what constitutes a foreignizing process as opposed to a domes-
ticating one is unable to account for specific situations in which the bound-
aries separating the domestic from the foreign are blurred, if not obliterated.
An interesting case in point, which happens to involve literary sociolects, is
described by Annie Brisset (1990), who shows how, during the 1960s and 70s,
Shakespeare, Brecht, Corneille, among others, were "retranslated" into joual
by Québec playwrights — a blatantly ethnocentric, domesticating gesture
whose aim, according to Brisset, was to reappropriate and naturalize foreign
cultural monuments in a nationalistic effort to facilitate the emergence of a
distinctly Québecois theatre. The cultural Other was consequently evacuated
to allow the emergence of the cultural Self (= domestication); the cultural and
linguistic specificity of the original was replaced by explicit references to the
geographical and political situation of Québec (= domestication) by way of a
marginalized sociolect that by definition contested the literary and cultural
hegemony of French from France (= resistance) and ostensibly presented a
high degree of acceptability for Québec readers (= domestication) who, used
to translations in "standard" Parisian French, were at once shaken from their
cultural complacency (= resistance) and forced to reflect on their national
identity as well as on the ways to impose its legitimacy with respect to
dominant, eurocentric values and attitudes (= domestication? resistance?).
One might also question the extent to which foreignizing strategies are
indeed more "respectful" of the source text's cultural and linguistic specific-
ity. Could it not be said that they simply reinfuse the latter with marginalized,
"politically correct" target-culture values, thus serving a dominated, but
nonetheless domestic, political and/or aesthetic discourse? As Françoise
Massardier-Kenney remarks, "adapting the radical gesture of the text could
very well be another way of making the text 'culturally fluent', of making it fit
our own contemporary expectations of what constitutes 'resistant' writing"
(1994: 15).
Similarly, while Berman has every right to advocate an equally foreigniz-
ing translation based on the letter rather than on the meaning of the source text,
62 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

and while he repeatedly acknowledges his intellectual debt to the German

Romantics, he glosses over the patently nationalistic program informing the
latter's preference for foreignizing strategies, whereby we, as target readers,
"should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its
use of language, its peculiarities" (Goethe quoted in Venuti 1995: 104) in
order to subordinate it to the construction of a national culture and identity.
Furthermore, while it is true that Berman emphasizes the role "literal" transla-
tions play in the enriching of the target language, he occults the elitist ideology
such practices tend to serve (and indeed did serve in 19th century Germany:
"an educated elite controls the formation of a national culture by refining its
language through foreignizing translations" (Venuti 1995: 102)), focusing
exclusively on their iconoclastic potential with respect to dominant cultural
discourses and on their ethically valorized fidelity to the Other.
His ensuing refusal to "translate for the public" — denounced as ethno-
centric — renders him oblivious (with a few exceptions) to the ethnocentric
potential of "literal" translations, despite their stated function to "welcome the
Foreigner as a Foreigner", again underscoring the latter's idealist nature.
Venuti is, to my mind, much more lucid when he writes (and here he implicitly
deconstructs his own dichotomy):
even when a translated text contains discursive peculiarities designed to
imitate a foreign text . . . , it never escapes the hierarchy of cultural values
inscribed in the target language. These values mediate every move in the
translation and every target-language reader's response to it, including the
perception of what is domestic or foreign . . . . (1995: 101-102)

Such an observation is abundantly corroborated by the problems raised by the

translation of literary sociolects.
Third, Venuti's and Berman's axiological positioning, while valid as a
personal cultural political (Venuti) or philosophical (Berman) standpoint,
lends itself to the same criticism astutely levelled by Rosemary Arrojo at the
supporters of a certain type of feminist approach to translation, who avail
themselves of the very double standard they reject in so-called patriarchal
translation practices. As Arrojo argues, feminist translation theorists who
chastize (mostly) male translators for "abusing" the original by rewriting it
according to patriarchal beliefs and attitudes, all the while granting themselves
the "right, even the duty to 'abuse' the source text" (von Flotow, cited by
Arrojo 1994: 157) so as to realign it with feminist values and causes without
changing its intended meaning, manifest the same "bad faith" as the transla-
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 63

tors they condemn. Just as feminist intervention "cannot be regarded as

absolutely more legitimate or less 'violent' than non-feminist translation
strategies" (Arrojo 1994: 159), fluent or hypertextual strategies cannot be
considered in themselves as more or less valid than foreignizing strategies.

3.4. The Translator's Responsibility

For these reasons, I believe it is imperative, as I stated above, to relativize the

dualistic nature of Venuti's and Berman's conceptions of translation in an
attempt to deal with the theoretical shortcomings that limit the validity of their
otherwise highly incisive arguments. For few contemporary translation theo-
rists and practitioners would deny the extreme importance of notions such as
domestication and foreignization, hypertextuality and fidelity to the "letter",
visibility and invisibility, as they apply to the translation process construed
as a meaning-producing activity. However, what needs to be more clearly
pointed out, to my mind, is the fact that no translation theorist or practitioner
cannot but position him or herself — aesthetically, politically, ideologically
— with respect to these "dichotomies". Indeed, it is this very positioning, be it
overt or covert, conscious or unconscious, avowed, unavowed or disavowed,
that enables us to go beyond dualist conceptions of translation in order to bring
to the fore the ethical stance which translation both entails and implies.
In other words, what is always already at stake in the translation process
is neither the visibility vs the invisibility of the translator nor the ethical aim of
translation per se, but rather the translator's own ethical code, his or her
responsibility and engagement with respect to the choices for which he or she
opts and the aesthetic, ideological and political meanings these choices gener-
ate. Barbara Folkart arrives at such a conclusion when she writes that, because
all translations are manipulative rewritings based on interpretive procedures,
translators can only strive to show "le plus de respect, le plus de probité, le
plus de rigueur possible" (1991: 437). And Berman himself, in his posthu-
mous book (1995), also takes such a stand. Presenting a much more nuanced
version of his initial theses, he rejects inflexible dichotomies in favour of the
"diverses dialectiques" (1995: 81) of translation and stresses the responsibility
of the translator who not only produces a (new, authentic) aesthetic object,
hence ensuring the "poeticity" of the translated text, but shows "un certain
respect de l'original" (1995: 92), thus ensuring the "ethicity" of his or her
work. It is through this respect that the translator's agency — his or her
64 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

conception of translation, the corresponding translation project and the "hori-

zon" which determines the conditions of possibility of such a conception and
such a project — is signified within the translated text.
The ethical aim of translation per se, as initially postulated by Berman, is
in this way displaced to qualify the fundamentally ethical orientation of the
two choices open to any translator: to conceal or acknowledge the transforma-
tions performed, together with their ideological underpinnings and the mean-
ings they suppress or create. It follows that not only are negative and positive
value accorded, respectively, to concealment and acknowledgement, but the
notions of fidelity and of invisibility are also redefined in ethical terms. The
"invisible" translator is no longer the one who resorts to fluent strategies, but
the one who refuses to take responsibility for his or her manipulations, who
"believes" s/he is merely conveying the information contained in the source
text: "the most dangerous manipulator is not the one who does it openly but
the one who claims to be objective" (Koskinen 1994: 451).
As for the concept of fidelity, "the only kind of fidelity we can possibly
consider is the one we owe to our own assumptions, not simply as individuals,
but as members of a cultural community which produces and validates them"
(Arrojo 1994: 160). In this light, fluency and resistance, fidelity to the letter or
to the meaning of the source text are mere derivatives of the translator's ethical
stance — defined as both historically determined and informed by the
translator's agency — which in turn is written into the text by way of these
same strategies, revealing what the "invisible" translator attempts to hide, and
confirming/contradicting what the "visible" translator openly acknowledges.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I should like to stress the fact that the relativization of the
various dichotomies traditionally constructed by translation theorists does not
merely lead, as the preceding paragraphs may suggest, to the creation of a new
dichotomy founded on two clear-cut, opposing ethical frameworks. If, as
postmodern hermeneutics has shown, indeterminacy is a valid epistemologi-
cal category, then all dualist oppositions must be "opened up" so as to include
such indeterminate phenomena as ambivalence, parody, polyphony, disconti-
nuity, heterogeneity. And if, as Foucault has shown in regard to discourse,
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 65

Il n'y a pas d'un côté le discours du pouvoir et en face, un autre qui s'oppose
à lui. Les discours sont des éléments ou des blocs tactiques dans le champ des
rapports de force; il peut y en avoir de différents et même de contradictoires à
l'intérieur d'une même stratégie; ils peuvent au contraire circuler sans chan-
ger de forme entre des stratégies opposées. (1976: 134-135),
then the two "opposing" poles of all binary constructions, including the
dichotomy between concealment and acknowledgement, must be seen as
"local" discursive tactics that assume multiple functions and support diverse
aesthetic, ideological and political strategies, depending on the socio-cultural
context in which they are deployed.
For the very concepts and practices of concealment and acknowledgement,
like those of equivalence and fidelity, transparence and resistance, are not only
historically determined, they imply "un acte initial, fondateur, d' évalutation"
(Barthes) the violence of which automatically situates them in a dialogical
relation to "conflicts of groups and languages", of sameness and otherness, of
inclusion and exclusion, whereby clear-cut dichotomies are undermined and
ethical codes are constantly traversed by multiple group allegiances, linguistic
indeterminacy, ideological "blind spots" and conflicting axiological positions.
This being said, one should not conclude to the arbitrariness of the two
ethical frameworks represented by concealment and acknowledgement. As
the case of literary sociolects eloquently demonstrates, translation is a "vio-
lent", decision-oriented, culturally determined discursive activity that com-
pels the translator to take a position with respect to the source text and author,
the source culture, the target culture and the target reader, thus engaging, over
and above socially imposed norms and values, the translator's agency together
with his or her responsibility in the production of meaning.

Author's address'.
Gillian Lane-Mercier • Department of French • McGill University • 3460
McTavish • MONTREAL, Quebec • Canada H3A 1X9

Notes

1. This article was written as part of a research project funded by the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. A much shorter version was presented at the
Maastricht-Lódź Duo Colloquium on "Translation and Meaning", Lódz, Poland, Sep­
tember 1995.
 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

2. While it is true that many translators do not openly state the nature of their choices, on the
one hand, and, on the other, that not all choices are conscious ones, translations at once
absorb target-culture ideologemes, project a specific conception of the translation act —
which is both historically determined and the result of a personal choice on the part of the
translator, and open various reading positions which enable the (re)construction, during
the reading process, of cultural images, attitudes, beliefs and values attributable to the
translating subject. In other words, any given translation implicitly (in the translated text
itself) or explicitly (in prefaces, interviews, etc.) reflects the pre-existing "translational
position" (Berman) of the translator; one which, by virtue of its binding nature, engages
not only the translator's subjectivity, but also his or her responsibility. In this sense, one
may speak of a translation pact, the epistemological and ethical dimensions of which are,
needless to say, far-reaching.

3. I should like to emphasize that the following critique of Folkart's treatment of literary
sociolects must in no way be generalized: I have isolated one very small aspect of her
otherwise highly important and rich description of the translation process, with which I
am in total agreement.
4. See also pp. 431-433, where Folkart refers to the French translation of the sociolect in
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Once again, while she points to the importance of
questions of motivation, she nonetheless links them to questions of authenticity and
verisimilitude, condemning simultaneously the translator's erratic use of an "artificial"
popular register to translate the "realistic" sociolect of Steinbeck's characters and the
suggestion that an "authentic" dialect such as Acadian be used.
5. The preceding remarks are heavily indebted to polysystem theory, as it has been devel-
oped by Itamar Even-Zohar (see 1978; 1979) and expanded upon by Gideon Toury (see
1980; 1981; 1982; 1995) in a series of important works devoted to the concept of "norm",
the impact of which has had a determining effect on most of the translation scholars cited
here. In the following section, where I attempt to contribute to the elaboration of an ethics
of translation, the role assumed by the polysystem of the receiving culture is omnipresent.
6. It should be noted that Berman distinguishes between the ethical dimension inherent to
translation, and hence to the act of translation, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an
ethical discourse on translation which "n'est pas tant fondé sur un concept abstrait de
traduire que sur la manière dont, aujourd'hui, nous apparaissent nécessairement non
seulement la traduction mais aussi la langue, la littérature, la culture, etc." (1990: 18). In
what follows, I refer only to the former, to which Berman himself attributed greater
importance in most of his writings, with the possible exception of his last book (Berman
1995).
7. It could be objected that Berman never intended to set up such rigid dichotomies; on the
contrary, as I hopefully make clear farther on, he was very aware of their relative,
dialectic nature. However, the very fact that he establishes a distinction between "good"
and "bad" translations ("J'appelle mauvaise traduction la traduction qui, généralement
sous couvert de transmissibilité, opère une négation systématique de l'étrangeté de
l'oeuvre étrangère" (1984: 17)) contradicts such a relativistic view: indeed, it could be
said that just as his treatment of literary sociolects, described above, leads him to negate
his anti-annexionist standpoint, Berman's conception of translation oscillates between
dualism and relativism — an oscillation that in itself is symptomatic, to my mind, of a
certain conceptual inconsistency which persists until the publication of his last book,
where it is finally dispelled.
 TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE 67

References

Arrojo, Rosemary. 1994. "Fidelity and the Gendered Translation". TTR VII:2. 147-163.
Barthes, Roland. 1984. Le bruissement du langage. Paris: Seuil.
Berman, Antoine. 1984. L'épreuve de l'étranger. Paris: Gallimard.
Berman, Antoine. 1985a. "La traduction comme épreuve de l'étranger". Texte 4. 67-81.
Berman, Antoine. 1985b. "La traduction et la lettre ou l'auberge du lointain". Antoine
Berman et al., eds. les tours de babel. Paris: Éditions Trans-Euro Repress, 1985. 31-150.
Berman, Antoine. 1990. "Préface". Brisset 1990: 9-19.
Berman, Antoine. 1995. Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. Paris: Gallimard.
Brisset, Annie. 1990. Pour une sociocritique de la traduction: Théâtre et altérité au Québec
(1968-1988). Longueuil, Québec: Les Éditions du Préambule.
Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1978. Papers in Historical Poetics. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics.
Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1979. "Polysystem Theory". Poetics Today 1:1-2. 287-310.
Folkart, Barbara. 1991. Le conflit des énonciations: Traduction et discours rapporté.
Candiac, Québec: Les Éditions Balzac.
Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.
Kadish, Doris. 1994. "Translation in Context". Kadish and Massardier-Kenney 1994: 26-
61.
Kadish, Doris and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, eds. 1994. Translating Slavery, Gender
and Race in French Women's Writing, 1793-1823. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 1994. "(Mis)translating the Untranslatable — The Impact of Deconstruc-
tion and Post-Structuralism on Translation Theory". Meta XXXIX:3. 446-452.
Lane-Mercier, Gillian. 1995a. "La traduction des discours directs romanesques comme
stratégie d'orientation des effets de lecture". Palimpsestes 9. 75-91.
Lane-Mercier, Gillian. 1995b. "Towards a Rhetorical Practice of Mimesis: Writing/Read-
ing/(Re)Translating Fictional Sociolects". Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry
15:3. 105-128.
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame.
London and New York: Routledge.
Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. 1994. "Translation Theory and Practice". Kadish and
Massardier-Kenney 1994: 11-25.
Schogt, Henry. 1988. Linguistics, Literary Analysis, and Literary Translation. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Simon, Sherry. 1992. "The Language of Cultural Difference: Figures of Alterity in Cana-
dian Translation". Venuti 1992: 159-176.
Toury, Gideon. 1980. "The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation". In Search of
a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980.
51-62.
Toury, Gideon. 1981. "Translated Literature: System, Norm, Performance. Toward a TT-
Oriented Approach to Literary Translation". Poetics Today 2:4. 9-27. [also: Toury
1980: 35-50.]
68 GILLIAN LANE-MERCIER

Toury, Gideon, 1982. "A Rationale for Descriptive Translation Studies". Dispositio VII: 19-
21.23-39.
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam-Philadel-
phia: John Benjamins.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1986. "The Translator's Invisibility". Criticism XXVIII:2. 179-212.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology.
London and New York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1992a. "Introduction". Venuti 1992: 1-17.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London
and New York: Routledge.