The Italian proverb 'traduttore, traditore' — translator, traitor — encapsulates a suspicion of translation that runs deep in Western literary culture. The assumption is that something essential is inevitably lost in the passage from one language to another, that the original possesses an authenticity the translation can only approximate. Yet this assumption, however intuitively appealing, rests on a philosophy of language that many contemporary theorists regard as naive — one that treats meaning as a fixed property of texts rather than as something constituted, at least in part, by the act of reading itself.
The history of biblical translation illustrates the political stakes with particular clarity. When Jerome produced the Vulgate — the Latin translation of the Bible that would dominate Western Christianity for a millennium — he did so under explicit papal instruction, and the resulting text became not merely a translation but an instrument of ecclesiastical authority.
The Church's resistance to vernacular translations was never purely theological; it was a defence of institutional power that depended on the mediation of a priestly class who alone possessed the linguistic competence to interpret the sacred text. The Romantic movement introduced a different but equally consequential theory of untranslatability. For thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and, later, Benjamin Lee Whorf, each language constituted a unique 'worldview' — a cognitive lens through which reality was not merely described but actively shaped.
A language that has fourteen words for snow, on this view, does not merely describe winter more precisely than one with two; its speakers literally perceive winter differently, and this perceptual difference is what translation, by definition, cannot convey. Walter Benjamin's celebrated 1923 essay 'The Task of the Translator' offered a radical alternative to both the fidelity model and the untranslatability thesis. Benjamin argued that the purpose of translation was not to reproduce the original but to reveal something about language itself — specifically, the existence of what he called 'pure language,' a substratum of meaning that no single language can express but toward which all languages, in their diversity, collectively gesture.
The translator's task, on Benjamin's account, was not to serve the reader but to serve language — to allow the foreign text to transform the domestic tongue rather than domesticating the foreign into familiar idiom. The postcolonial turn in translation studies has added an explicitly political dimension to these theoretical debates. The scholar Lawrence Venuti has argued that the dominant Anglo-American tradition of translation privileges 'fluency' — a strategy that renders the translated text as natural and idiomatic as possible, effectively erasing the foreignness of the source.
The alternative Venuti champions — 'foreignisation' — deliberately preserves the strangeness of the original, producing translations that read as translations, that remind the reader at every turn of the cultural distance they are traversing. Whether translation can ever truly escape the power dynamics Venuti describes is a question that continues to generate intense debate. The global dominance of English means that translations into English vastly outnumber translations out of it, creating what the translation scholar Pascale Casanova has called a 'world republic of letters' whose centre — the Anglophone publishing industry — determines which foreign literatures achieve international visibility and which remain confined to their domestic markets.
The paradox is inescapable: the very mechanism by which literatures cross borders — translation — is also the mechanism by which the hierarchies between them are established and maintained.