Fuzzy Memories: Why Narrators forget they translate for Animals

Professional translators indisputably provide economic value that merits remuneration. From an ideal semiotic perspective, however,one can argue that translators add no value at all, since 'the output is supposed to be directly exchangeable for the input'.¹ Semiotically, in other words, a translator is 'nobody'.² Of course, this point about translator nobodies is not new. Indeed, it reflects a long-held – and respected – attitude toward translators and translation: translators should neither be seen nor heard. Several well-known works of children's literature – Margery Sharp's The Rescuers, and Hugh Lofting's The Story of Doctor Dolittle and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle – call attention to this attitude in an unusual way. In each of these novels, inter-species communication is an issue. What happens is that the narrator expressly states that communication is taking place in mouse language (or whatever), then supposedly translates all the dialogue for the reader.In many instances, the narrator provides these translations inexplicitly, with no reference to their status as translations. The narrator thus acts as a covert translator, an unacknowledged nobody.

Unfortunately, such covert translation sometimes leads to characters acting in ways that contradict the narrative's linguistic rules. These inconsistencies suggest a kind of narrator amnesia: the narrator has 'forgotten' that covert translation is taking place. Under such circumstances, readers may simply conclude that the narrator (or the author) has been careless. That conclusion may be correct, but it is also uninteresting. In particular, it does not consider why narrators might become careless about covert translation. This paper suggests why it is that narrators 'forget' about their own covert translation. The first part explores translator subjectivity and a special instance of translating subjects: fiction narrators who engage in covert translation. The next demonstrates how covert translation makes narrator amnesia possible. The last part provides two possible explanations for narrator amnesia. Based upon those explanations, the paper concludes by describing how narrator amnesia reflects translation's inferior status in monolingual cultures.

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In developing an 'equivalence-based theory of translation', Anthony Pym studies how translations are received. Specifically, Pym emphasizes readers' expectations when they read a text they believe to be a translation. Concerning reader expectations vis-à-vis the translator, Pym argues that readers 'might know who the translator is' but 'they justdo not care'. Particularly in a world of seemingly innumerable 'weakly authored source texts' – texts such as computer manuals and news stories – the very nature of those texts 'invites receivers to forget about all senders and their potential first persons'. Furthermore, if source-text authors generate little interest, translators generate even less. For most translations, therefore, readers' expectations of equivalence mean that 'nobody in particular' could have translated the work 'with little or no change in the reception process' (Pym, p. 69).

Readers' expectations for translatorial nobodies reflect Pym's first maxim of representation: the maxim of 'first-person displacement'. This maxim posits that 'translators cannot occupy an "I", a first-person pronoun'. Translators cannot occupy an 'I' because translation is a kind of 'reported speech' (Pym, p. 70). That is, readers read every word of a translation with the understanding that each word should be read as 'saying something like "… the absent Spanish text translates as …"'. Thus, in translation, readers understand the statement: 'Gromit said,"I love cheese"' as follows: 'Gromit's words translate as "I love cheese."' Readers' understanding of translates as – what Pym labels 'the equivalence operator' – underlies every translation (Pym, p. 72). This equivalence operator explains why readers expect the person saying'I' in a translation to be the same person who said 'I' in the sourcetext. Based on the equivalence operator's primacy, Pym affirms that translators must remain anonymous.

Like Pym, Lawrence Venuti recognizes readers' expectations of translator anonymity. Venuti, however, believes that translator invisibility creates two decidedly negative situations. First, it 'reinforces' the 'marginal status' of translation work.³ Second, invisibility facilitates Anglo-American cultural dominance. Specifically, Venuti describes a kind of 'trade imbalance' in which fluent translations of 'the most varied English-language books' far outnumber translations into English. To combat these problems, Venuti...