TEXT 6. Well written and badly written texts

The translator has to assess the quality and value of the writing in the source language text. The common translator's distinction between literary and non-literary texts, assuming that the importance of the first lies in its formal elements and of the second in its factual content, and therefore that the first must be translated closely and the second freely, is mistaken. An opposite, and equally misguided view is that a non-literary text, being scientific, must be accurately translated, whilst a literary text, being artistic, allows infinite licence in translation. It might be more profitable to regard the non-literary text as denotative, and therefore to be translated slavishly in all its surface detail, and the literary text as connotative, and therefore to be translated to reveal its latent meaning, to point the allegory in the story, the moral in the action, etc., as well as its sensuous qualities (sound effects, such as metre and onomatopoeia, and visual images) if one accepts Molière's dictum that the two main functions of art are to please (the senses sensuously) and to correct (morally).

However, the basic distinction is not between literary and non-literary texts, but between good (or effective) and bad (or ineffective) writing. If a text is well written, whether it is literary or scientific, historical or technological, its formal components are of prime importance, and the translator must respect them and fully account for them in his version, not by any kind of imitation but by transposing them through deep structure ('what does this really mean?') to congruent formal components. It is as misguided to talk about the 'art' of literary translation and the 'skill' of non-literary translation as to imply that science is inferior to art. The translation of poetry is often more difficult than any other kind of translation only because poetry is the only literary form that uses all the resources of languages, and therefore there are more levels of language to be accounted for.

The translator is, however, entitled to treat the formal components of a badly written text, whether popular or technical, with considerable freedom, since by replacing clumsy with elegant syntactic structures, by removing redundant or repetitive items, by reducing the cliché and the vogue-word to a plainer statement, by clarifying the emphasis and tightening up the sentence, he is attempting to give the text's semantic content its full value. (Thus he is performing a double translation, first intra-, then interlingual.) Nevertheless, the translator is often at risk in declaring a text to be badly written. A text that is ponderous, contorted and ornate, that sins against the fraudulent canons of simplicity, clarity and brevity may indeed be well written if it expresses the author's personality without distorting his message; it is only badly written if the message is lost in the conventional received jargon which appears designed to make its own irrelevant but 'with it' impression.

A translation is normally written and intended for a target language reader–even if the source language text was written for no reader at all, for nothing but its author's pleasure. The translator has to assist his reader. In plain terms, it is usually more important for him to make or indicate the sense of a passage than to funk the issue by rendering it 'correctly'. He may have to explain or transpose allusions, supply reasons, emphasize contrasts. Even if the SL text is generalized and abstracted on the analogy of non-figurative art or has what seems like surrealistic or stochastic interventions, it is his duty to make his version a little more accessible to the reader, to find at least some pattern in non-sense. Styles which are dense and intellectualized may also require assistance from the translator.

(Newmark P. Approaches to Translation. Cambridge, 1988. P. 127-128)