Questions: Literary Translation: Theory and Practice

Question 1

A translator rendering Dante's *Divine Comedy* into English chooses not to use rhyme, producing flowing blank verse instead of terza rima. Which of the following best describes this translational choice?

• A. It is a translation error — rhyme is an intrinsic part of the *Comedy* and any omission is a failure of fidelity.
• B. It is a prioritization decision: the translator judges that meaning and narrative flow are more central to the work's value than its sonic form, accepting the loss of terza rima's musicality.
• C. It is necessarily a domesticating choice, because blank verse is more natural to English readers than rhymed poetry.
• D. It is necessarily a foreignizing choice, because abandoning rhyme makes the text feel more exotic and distant.

Answer: (B)

There is no neutral, costless translation. English has fewer rhymes than Italian, so forcing terza rima risks distorting meaning; abandoning it loses the sonic propulsion that drives Dante's verse. Neither choice is objectively 'right' — they reflect different theories of what makes the *Comedy* worth reading. The translator who abandons rhyme (like Mandelbaum) prioritizes semantic fidelity; the translator who preserves rhyme (like Ciardi) prioritizes musical experience. Both are legitimate interpretive choices, not errors — but they produce different reading experiences and imply different answers to what translation is for.

Question 2

A publisher wants a translation of a Japanese novel that reads completely naturally in English — no unusual syntax, no untranslated cultural terms, no footnotes. According to translation theory, what is the theoretical cost of this approach?

• A. Foreignization — by making it natural in English, the translator has foreignized the text, making it feel strange to Japanese readers.
• B. Domestication — the translation erases cultural and linguistic difference, and the strangeness that marks the text as Japanese is lost.
• C. There is no cost — fluency is always the goal of literary translation, and any remaining difficulty is an artifact of poor technique.
• D. The translation loses accuracy — natural-sounding English is always less precise than a literal word-for-word rendering.

Answer: (B)

This is domesticating translation, and Venuti's critique is that it erases cultural difference. When cultural references are adapted, unusual syntax is normalized, and the text reads as if originally written in English, readers lose the encounter with another culture's way of seeing and saying. The text is made comfortable, but at the cost of its foreignness. Foreignizing translation instead preserves that strangeness, insisting that readers cross over to meet the original rather than having the original domesticated to meet them. Both approaches make real political and aesthetic choices about what readers deserve.

Question 3

According to Walter Benjamin and other translation theorists, translation can reveal or add something that was not visible or accessible in the original text.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is Benjamin's key insight in 'The Task of the Translator': translation does not merely carry the original into a new language — it illuminates the original from a new angle, making visible aspects that the source language could not surface. A translation may make implicit connotations explicit, find resonances in the target language the original lacked, or reveal something latent in the original that was always there but not yet perceptible. Benjamin reframes translation from an impoverished copy to a creative act that enriches understanding of the original.

Question 4

A domesticating translation is more faithful to the original than a foreignizing translation, because it better captures the meaning of the source text.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Fidelity is not a single dimension — you can be faithful to meaning, to rhythm, to cultural context, to sound, or to the reading experience. Domesticating translations prioritize semantic naturalness in the target language, which often means adapting cultural references and idioms that would confuse readers. But this clarity comes at the cost of the original's cultural specificity and textual strangeness. A foreignizing translation may be more faithful to the original's linguistic texture and cultural embeddedness, even if it reads less naturally. Both approaches reflect different theories of what 'fidelity' means — there is no neutral standard.

Question 5

Why is 'lost in translation' a misleading framing for what actually happens in literary translation?

Model answer: It presupposes translation is purely subtraction — that the original is a fixed payload that can only be degraded in transit. But translation also involves addition and transformation: a translation can make implicit meanings explicit, find resonances in the target language the original lacked, and reach new readers who would otherwise have no access to the work. What is 'lost' depends entirely on what the translator chose to prioritize — loss and gain are decisions, not inevitable facts of the translation relationship.

Benjamin's framing is the most radical: translation reveals something latent in the original, something that was always there but not yet accessible. A great translation of Homer can illuminate aspects of the text that readers of the original Greek never noticed. 'Lost in translation' also implies a single correct translation exists that merely lost fidelity — but the existence of multiple legitimate, incompatible translations of the same work (each preserving different features) shows that what gets lost and gained is a function of translator choices, not a fixed property.