On Relationality: Trusting Translators

Abstract

By discussing examples and sources from premodern history and early modern Europe in particular, this chapter closely examines the interpersonal, institutional, and regime-enacted types of trust, as well as the ethos of past and present translators and interpreters from the perspective of trust-signalling and its reception. This discussion of translation centred on the theme of trust invites scholars to follow translators, their work, and their networks of trust both downstream (from the translated text or culture to readers and clients) and upstream (from the reception of a given translation and translator to the translated text or request to translate).

Trust is often silent, whereas distrust tends to leave traces. Such traces can emerge through a study of the reception of the translated text, or from the pre-emptive claims of trustworthiness made by translators themselves. For instance, concern that unscrupulous interpreters working for the early modern French judicial system would abet a guilty person led judges to demand that new notaries, clerks, and interpreters transcribe and translate documents ‘from the Flemish language into the French language, faithfully, without changing the substance of the facts in any way’.¹ For similar reasons, the Translators’ College (Siyi guan) in China (1467–1748) housed up to sixty translators of different identities and languages, who produced translations or official documents; these were then paraphrased in Chinese, and back-translated by other translators to verify the reliability and quality of the first translation.² In both examples we see regimes of relative distrust at work in translation. From such archival material we can gather evidence of the distrustee, and about who was trained or paid to trust or to be trustworthy. We also gauge the historical interactions between social systems (in these cases legal, political, and intercultural), as explained shortly.

Whether visible or not, trust is in every relation that translators and interpreters enter into with texts, and with those people around them. As discussed in Chap. 1, translation has implications for at least three levels of trust: interpersonal (between translator, editor, publisher, author, or client, for instance), institutional (trust in a profession), and regime-enacted. All three types of trust are relational from the micro to the macro levels. Whether the historian is interested in the relationship between early modern printer and scholar Aldo Manuzio (c. 1450–1515) and his network of translators and scholars, or in the development of the print industry in seventeenth-century Japan, the study of trust in translation investigates the relationships and transactions between individuals, groups, organisations, professions, and regimes of knowledge. Hence a micro history of translation might suggest that the concept of ‘the progress of poetry’ crystallised in seventeenth-century England.³ In fact, similar concepts existed in antiquity and early modern Italy, and eventually made their way into England by means of translation.⁴ This presents a challenge for historical studies as well as translation studies: to find means of grasping the interaction between small-scale and large-scale processes of intercultural mediation.⁵ Translation history is well positioned to find the in-between space between micro and macro levels.

Whether at micro or macro levels, any form of translation (textual, visual, oral) is a social act involving at least three actors (translator, editor, and patron, for instance), and one, two or more texts (start texts and target texts). There is only one text when the translation is a pseudotranslation, but, importantly, the one text is presented as a translation and received as such.⁶

How might we understand ‘social’ in the context of trust? The sphere of the social can be handled conceptually by thinking in terms of ‘the various mediations that place people into “social” relations with one another’.⁷ This conceptualisation breaks any national, identity, and institutional bounds, and offers a perspective different from more traditional concepts of the social realm as comprising societies, classes, categories, and institutions. It also offers a broader scope for the study of mediations that are not just discoursal (language-based) but non-discoursal too (kinaesthetic or emotional). As an expressed emotion, for instance, trust can be both a discoursal and non-discoursal form of mediation. The presence of translators’ portraits presenting their work to patrons or readers on the title page of an early modern translation conveys several emotionally-charged and non-discoursal signs of trustworthiness.

How does one study discoursal mediations, especially since they can be irregular and unpredictable? Let us offer an example here. In their prefaces or letters of dedication, early modern European translators often invoke their trustworthiness as faithful messengers or interpreters of the translated text or culture. A quantitative study of these statements can reveal the frequency of such self-fashioning pronouncements, their rhetorical nature, effect, register, and intertextual connections with earlier works.⁸ Still, such a study cannot explain what trust or distrust meant in practice to the translator, interpreter, or patron. This is because social signals (both textual and visual) used for the production of trustworthiness are determined by semiotic practices that require both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

To be sure, the collection of ‘hard’ data on the numbers of translations produced by particular translators or printers, where, with what materials, and with what technology offers crucial information that can indicate how receptive a certain society, court, or group was to intercultural mediation and exchange. Yet the use of a quantitative causality is insufficient for an understanding of semiotically generated mediations such as interpreting and translation. The social dimension of translation requires concepts and tools that can explain conditions behind the quantitative production and reception of translations. William H. Sewell Jr. proposes the examination of three levels of social agency in history: ‘eventful’, which deals with the ephemera and contingencies of agency and socio-cultural production; ‘conjunctural’, associated with economic, technological, and political factors, and, thirdly, ‘structural’, concerned with the mental, cultural, and social structures informing change (we call this level ‘regimes’).⁹ All three levels are complementary and interconnected. This tripartite division of causality behind the production and reception of translation allows translation historians to focus on several aspects of intercultural mediation at the same time. Historians may wish to focus on contingent social agency (the study of one translator, and her or his network of patrons, publishers, fellow intellectuals, and readers), or on the cultural, social, and economic elements informing how translations were produced and translators were perceived by their community.

Inevitably, the regime-enacted level of trust informs the interpersonal and institutional spheres. Regimes include values and perceptions about skills, knowledge, aesthetic or literary practices, and social capital that can support or undermine the translators’ trustworthy-signalling across time and space. Regimes also include ‘substantive attributes of entities in social networks’.¹⁰ Attributes are generally culture-specific physical attributes (physical appearance of texts or interpreters) and have the power to influence the making of networks of trust.

Regimes need to be supported by human and non-human resources, which include skills, technology, economic capital, and materials such as libraries, paper, presses, and computers. Attention to these resources supersedes any dichotomy between theory and practice, since it encourages the study of both macro and micro aspects of translation, while also focussing on the agency of translators and their collaborators. Take, for instance, Leonardo Bruni’s work as translator from Greek into Latin in the first three decades of the fifteenth century. He helped to foster a politico-cultural regime now usually termed the ‘Italian Renaissance’, which championed the prestige of classical Latin, the reputation of humanist scholars, and the theory and practices of learning and translation postulated by ancient intellectuals such as Cicero and Quintilian. These principles in turn required the use of specific human and non-human resources. For Bruni, relevant human attributes included a preference for rhetorical translations (that is, eloquent and ‘free’), the authority of the fifteenth-century translator who can outclass the start author or earlier translator, and the ideal of translation as the work of an individual rather than as collaboration. Non-human resources included the use of humanistic minuscule handwriting style, the bianchi girari miniatures, and the tendency to use folio-sized paper instead of quarto. All non-human and human resources were aimed at validating regimes—for instance the prestige of classical Latin and of the new intellectual during the rise of merchant economies in Italian and other European city-states. It follows that the study of resources informs our understanding of the overarching cultural regimes. At the same time, regimes explain the preference of certain resources over others. Resources may therefore be read as texts than can allow us to ‘recover the cultural schemas they instantiate’.¹¹

Concerning non-human resources, in 2001 David Hamilton observed how the study of printing had changed in the preceding sixty years:

since the 1950s, the history of moveable-type printing has moved from studies of ‘communication’ to the analysis of the mutually-constitutive practices of writers, printers, book-sellers, translators and proof-readers who, collectively, are implicated in the organisation and use of communication technologies.¹²

This statement indicates how understanding processes of communication (rather than its content) is crucial if we wish to understand the history of the commensurabilty and trustworthiness of translation and translators. It also alerts us to two aspects: on the one hand, the production of communicative texts is always the result of collaboration between agents (publishers, authors, editors, marketing departments, and so on); on the other hand, the trust that readers or listeners put into a communicative act depends on how they perceive non-human resources (technology, for example), as well human resources (agency or professionalism).

The three levels of trust (interpersonal, institutional, and regime-enacted) represent the micro and the macro processes of intercultural mediation mentioned above. As a social and cultural event, intercultural mediation is transformative, in the sense that it reproduces and inevitably alters the communication and perception of translated texts and cultures. But it also has potential to empower the translators, their patrons, and clients with social, cultural, and economic capital. A tripartite eventful sociological approach might help translation historians to avoid looking for no more than tenuous large-scale laws, and to search instead for the mutual influences of contingent, open-ended factors.

Let us put the tripartite levels into practice. In her monograph Brokering Empire, Toronto-based historian Natalie Rothman has recently shed much light on early modern trans-imperial subjects (1571–1669) and their contribution to trade in early modern Venice and its territories. These subjects were cultural and commercial brokers, religious converts, and dragomans (diplomatic interpreters). Unusually, Rothman explores archival sources as a means to understand cultural mediation in early modern Venice and the Ottoman Empire: she examines how trans-imperial subjects made claims about their identity, roles, and skills, and how these claims were received by the Venetian Board of Trade. Their claims or pleas are available from archival documents such as Petitions to the Venetian State, transcripts of trials, and the official responses from the Venetian State. Rothman brilliantly demonstrates the fluidity and complexity of the eventful and conjunctural dimensions of these mediators’ lives and pleas: the contingent strategies adopted by these subjects to reassure or convince Venetian or Ottoman officials of their good service and their right to live or work in Venice and its territory. The ways in which official dragomans fashioned themselves as necessary and trustworthy to the State and beyond reveals their personal life exigencies, as well as the cultural values expected or assumed by the Venetian government.

Where are trust and translation in Brokering Empire? Rothman offers invaluable quantitative data on intercultural mediators’ pleas and the outcomes of their petitions, but less on the types of trust (personal, institutional, or regime-enacted) invoked and expected by these go-betweens and their clients and patrons. Take, for instance, the petition made by Teodoro Dandolo (1608), who asked the Venetian State to employ him as official interpreter of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and ‘Indian’. Having lived in the Uzbek city of Bukhara, he had recently moved to Aleppo, then Venice (where he was converted to Christianity), and Rome.¹³ His application to be trained as a Public Dragoman was turned down, because some members of the Venetian Board of Trade doubted his trustworthiness: even if he had converted to Christianity, it was feared that he could still favour Muslim nations. Despite this fear, four months later the same Board approved his application to become a commercial broker of the ‘Turks and Levantines’ trading in Venice. Why did the Board not trust Dandolo as a dragoman, but found him trustworthy as a commercial broker? Did an interpreter rely on personal as well as institutional trust, while the broker relied on relationships of thin trust? Were the two roles subject to different regimes and expectations? In this case the answer lies in the patrician mindset of those who comprised the Board of Trade in early seventeenth-century Venice—the nobles’ uncertainty about the political and legal reputation of converts in their city. The choice to eventually approve Dandolo’s application to become a commercial broker shows a tension between varying degrees of interpersonal distrust and the demand to employ more interpreters in Venice. This example points to the asymmetry of trust in intercultural translation. It also shows how trust and distrust may coexist in the same web of unequal intercultural relationships. We now turn to a detailed discussion of networks of intercultural mediation, especially to consider how they can be studied in the context of translation history.

Understanding the Dynamics of Trust Networks

To establish themselves as part of collaborative networks, translators and interpreters in early modern Europe habitually outlined their connections to a great variety of cultural, social, and economic agents; these could include friends, rulers, and dedicatees. In the words of US-based scholar Paul D. McLean, such networks offered a ‘generative ecology for the emergence of a quasi modern, relational conception of the self’.¹⁴ Along these lines, the statements written down by translators tend to reveal complex interrelationships between their work as individuals with skills, purpose, and ambition, and the community for which they made their translations.

Let us return to the use and meaning of the term ‘network’, which we have already touched on in Chap. 1. This term has been variously adopted by translation scholars. Michael Cronin discusses ‘networks of intertextual influence’, by which he means the ubiquity of printed and online texts that allows translations to be accessed and shared globally.¹⁵ Cronin also refers to the technological networks used by translators. Anthony Pym uses ‘network’ to describe chains of relationships between translations, translators, and institutions (universities, printing presses, and so forth) within and beyond national and international borders.¹⁶ Pym also suggests that translation historians focus on movements of objects (texts, technology, and materials) and subjects (authors, translators, patrons, printers, and suchlike) in time and space.

Networks differ from bodies of work in that they reveal connections between texts and people as the connections emerge, rather than relying on preset criteria. There is always a point of departure, but the ends are open both downstream (as one traces where translations and translators go) and upstream (as one traces where they came from). Pym describes this approach as one led by ‘methodological curiosity’ as well as reductive and expansive narratives.¹⁷ A mapping of networks provides the necessary skeleton for any research project in translation history, perhaps before texts are analysed in a systematic way. Cultural historians have recently shown strong interest in how information and knowledge moved from place to place, and how these cultural materials changed in the process.¹⁸ Scholars are increasingly interested in studying brokers and go-betweens.¹⁹ This interest underpins a clear shift in historiography, where the main interest is no longer in what ‘truths’ crossed from one culture to another, but who mediated such a transfer and how the process was enacted. In the words of philosopher of science Ian Hacking, ‘[c]ommunication of ways to think is what matters’, and such broader movements can be grasped on the level of networks.²⁰

The micro level of a translator or text can be triangulated with the macro contexts of the regimes that influence what texts are available to be translated, why they are or are not translated, for whom they are transferred, and how they are translated. This is not new, of course. The social turn in translation studies has recognised that translations are almost never produced by a single individual; rather, they tend to be the result of a ‘complex channel of mediators’.²¹ Following sociological approaches—Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, for example, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field—translation scholars and historians are now highly critical of the depersonalised (or ‘text-only’ approach) to the study of translation. In 2007, cultural historians Peter Burke and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia affirmed the need to focus on who translated, and those for whom the translations were undertaken (as well as what the materials were, and how they were translated) in a manner that resonates beyond translation studies. Concerns about agency in translation also chime strongly with new trends in literary history. Over the past five decades, authorship studies and book historians have offered highly nuanced accounts of the various modes of authorship and collaboration in the production of any text, including translations. The printed book is now seen as an intricate space in which authorial, social, and economic factors play out, including trust and distrust.²²

So how can we study trust within networks of translation, and what can trust tell us about them? It is worth recalling here that by ‘trust’ we mean not only who was entrusted to produce the texts we can access and study today, but also how trustworthy the intercultural mediators and their networks were considered. Trust or distrust encapsulates complex rhetorical, emotional, and attitudinal signals: promise-making, sincerity, and readers’ and audiences’ reactions to texts and agents. Emotional reactions to translations (and the rhetoric of emotions used by translators in the prefaces to their work) emerge, for example, from complaints about the interpreting done by a foreign go-between—a very common occurrence before nation states decided to train their own interpreters.²³ We know from cognitive psychology that emotions can be the result of perceptions based on the appraisal of a situation, person—or text, in our case. Perception is therefore followed by appraisal, which leads to emotions and action readiness.²⁴ Specific emotions are not hardwired in the psyche, and are not equal in all cultures. Similarly, trust bears different meanings and expressions in different cultures and languages. Understanding how trust or distrust is expressed in a given context, and what it means for a community, helps to unlock the way a community values translation and interpreting. The distrust-led practices of the French judicial system and the Translators’ College (Siyi guan) in China discussed above are examples of how this unlocking can happen by researching eventful, conjunctural, and regime-enacted elements of social and intercultural history.

Downstream Flows of Trust

When talking through an interpreter, speakers and their audiences may be put in a context in which the mediatory voice is assumed to be ‘transparent’.²⁵ In some historical cultures of translation, this is perceived as the illusion effect of translation, whereby all parties involved are asked to assume that the interpreter was trained to successfully convey content and context. Brian Harris called this illusion the ‘norm of the true interpreter’.²⁶ There is a sincerity rule at play here, a downstream claim that ‘exchange speech acts satisfy a condition of mutual trust’.²⁷ Forced assumptions of accuracy and honesty underpin the reception of the interpreter’s work—and of the translated text. These assumptions are forced because of the context of simultaneous interpreting, in which the client often lacks the time or space to question or distrust the interpretation of communication. In addition, the interpreters’ mediation presupposes a commitment of service without an explicit oath of fidelity. Further, this assumption is not always accepted, especially when it is forced from above (by a government, for instance). In recent years, refugees who need to rely on an interpreter to argue their case have been less inclined to risk being misinterpreted by mediators. For this reason, some prefer to rely on family members or friends (personal, thick trust) or online machine translation instead of professionals (institutional, thin trust).²⁸ Evidently, clients who need to avail themselves of interpreters for legal or administrative processes weigh up the reasons why they need to communicate, and what they expect from the mediation.

It happens, therefore, that claims of trust made or implied downstream can be met by upstream distrust. In these cases, the client may fill the space between reason and expectation with emotions of distrust. Trust, in these terms, is ‘a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behaviour of another’.²⁹ When clients are not prepared to accept vulnerability, they distrust the intercultural mediation. Taking an oath, as interpreters do in court nowadays—and did in early modern France—may instil confidence in the role and practice of the mediator. Oaths of fidelity were a common practice in premodern Europe. They were not just a vassalic act of submission to a ruler, since they could also ‘symbolise the creation or confirmation of an interpersonal bond’.³⁰ As a symbolic act of trust, the medieval oath is comparable to the prefatory statements accompanying ancient, medieval, modern, and some contemporary translations. In these pronouncements, translators (or their publishers, editors, patrons, or peers) make claims about the validity of their work, its accuracy, correctness, fidelity, and clarity of expression. These statements signal to their readers or listeners that the texts and their translators are trustworthy.

Past translators made recourse to a wide range of literary and artistic strategies of self-presentation and translation. Such strategies were inseparable from highly specific choices regarding material and artistic aspects of the premodern book (mise en page, typeface, printing technologies, paratextual elements such as annotations and corrections, decorative and figurative elements such as landscapes and portraits). More broadly, such strategies were in dynamic relationships with the socio-cultural and commercial contexts that influenced the production of text-objects. Indeed, words, images, mise en page, ink, and other material and artistic elements signal the collaborative nature of translation. Collaboration underscores trust: the collective efforts of translators, editors, and printers in the early printing era promised new books to be ‘with all diligence thoroughly corrected’.³¹

Looking at European early modern translation, artists, authors, editors, printers, readers, and patrons as well as self-described translators all contributed to the conception, production, and transmission of translations. To understand the downstream rhetoric of claims made by translators and patrons for whom they worked is to apprehend what risks might have been perceived by the client. That is, the translators’ promises, self-reflexive statements, and claims of meeting patrons’ expectations allow us to study the trust-making aspects of intercultural communication.

The history of translation and interpreting is rich with claims and self-serving statements about the cause, process, and intended reception of translation. Some of these marks also took the form of ‘artistic visibility’. Take, for instance, the presence of monkeys and dogs in paratextual images accompanying translations, where they witness the translators’ self-awareness, and the collaborative nature of their work. The likeness between humans and apes was deeply unsettling for thinkers of the European ancient world as well as medieval and Renaissance writers. This uneasy view of apes inspired numerous visual representations of monkeys acting as men, or being devious or mischievous. In medieval manuscripts, monkeys and other ‘irreverent’ beasts occupy the ‘cultural space of the [printed or manuscript] margins’, and were often used to symbolise vices such as deceit, fraud, vanity, and promiscuity, among others.³²

Indeed, imitation was a key source of fascination and amusement for early modern European audiences. Scholars and authors understood imitatio as a creative process that could transform both writer and reader—provided that the imitation was performed by scholars with the appropriate training and skills, who addressed their work to an educated audience. Late medieval and Renaissance authors commonly referred to monkeys either to praise or blame imitators or followers of ancient authorities. Being a close imitator of an influential textual authority such as Marcus Tullius Cicero was a practice commended by some Renaissance scholars, whereas for others this practice was perceived as too slavish an imitation. The spectrum of possibilities for literary and rhetorical production swung between imitation of eloquent speech as a worthy and civilising process, and the danger of losing one’s own voice by following a literary or oratorical model too closely, or poorly. A fine line separated a ‘good’ imitator who internalised and competed against the model from a ‘bad’ imitator of a commendable model: the latter was known as a ‘Schlur-affen’, or lazy ape, from Desiderius Erasmus’s ‘ape of Cicero’. Late medieval and Renaissance authors and translators such as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Angelo Poliziano, or Paolo Cortesi variously praised or mocked their peers for imitating ancient literary authorities like monkeys.³³ The negative connotation is that which persisted through centuries, as indicated by French translator Maurice-Edgar Coindreau (1892–1990):

Firstly, a translator is a person with no rights, only duties. He must show loyalty to the author like a dog, but as a special dog who behaves like a monkey. If I’m not mistaken, Mauriac [the French novelist] wrote: “The novelist is God’s monkey”. Well, the translator is the novelist’s monkey. He is obliged to pull the same faces, like it or not.³⁴

Coindreau’s remark addresses the question of where translation sits in the history of literary imitation. We suggest that the question could well be readdressed: what regimes informed the work of translators and interpreters across cultures and history?

Upstream Flow of Trust

How can historians navigate the upstream flows of trust in the history of intercultural translation? Unsurprisingly, upstream journeys are harder than those downstream. This is because often the members of a network on the receiving end of translation leave no traces of trust. One could argue that silence may be indicative of trust. The silence of trust can be as telling as the non-translated or the almost untranslatable. We say almost because nothing is untranslatable, as much as nothing is totally translatable. In the words of French philosopher Jacques Derrida,

[t]otally translatable, it disappears as a text, as writing, as a body of language. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately. Thus triumphant translation is neither the life nor the death of a text, only or already its living on, its life after life, its life after death.³⁵

For the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, untranslatable words travel uncomfortably between languages and texts, and force translators to make difficult choices.³⁶ And difficult choices sometimes require translators or interpreters to comment on their strategies, leaving clues about their own skills, how they trusted the start texts, and how they claim to have produced a trustworthy text or not.

A thick and thin kind of upstream trust is appealed to in the common practice of referencing, as in the notes that we give here at the end of the chapter: ‘trust us, we have read all these books and have borrowed their authority’. Medieval Islamic historians had a somewhat similar practice in the use of the textual isnad (‘support’), which listed the chain of prior authorities who had passed down a report (ḥadīth), particularly when leading back to the Prophet Muhammad ibn ʿAbdullāh. When the Qur’anic texts came to be translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century, the Christian translators had no similar tradition, since the authority of their sacred texts came first from the hierarchy of the Church (institutional trust), and second from an appeal to faith (perhaps describable as interpersonal trust in ‘the Word of God’). The main translator thus omitted the isnad : ‘I, the Latin translator, have silenced these Saracen authorities, whose names are too foreign to our language and, even if copied out with care, would bear no fruit’.³⁷ In 1930, the English scholar David Samuel Margoliouth noted that use of the isnad nevertheless ‘gave the Muslims an obvious advantage in their controversies with Jews and Christians, who gave more the appearance of taking their information on trust’.³⁸ It seems more reasonable, however, to see two different kinds of upstream trust here: the Islamic practice sought a genealogy, a chain of prior mediators, and hence trust in people, whereas the Christian practice invested trust in the written word itself.

With reference to reception, it can be challenging for the historian to find such visible clues. Scholars of translation studies have been recommending that twenty-first-century readers be aware of translators’ and interpreters’ ‘voices’ and strategies. A way of acknowledging the ‘translator’s individual and social signature’ is suggested by Belgian scholar Theo Hermans (who is based at University College London).³⁹ Hermans encourages today’s readers to consider translation as reported or echoed speech in which ‘the translator, as an authorial presence, lets the original author speak in his or her own name’. This type of reading unsettles ordinary perceptions of contemporary translation, giving more prominence to the agency of translators. Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that past readers and clients read translation as echoed speech. This is because translators tended to be more visible and vocal about their translation strategies—at least the translators of the past we are very familiar with: from those in twelfth-century Spain to James Strachey’s Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud’s works in English, begun in the mid-twentieth century.⁴⁰ The visibility of translators’ names, and the editorial evidence of their work in books, letters, decrees, notices, and so on; the mise-en-page, presentation, and conservation of the translation has the potential to offer clues to the perceived trustworthiness of translators, and also to their role in successful trading or cultural ventures. Rothman among others has unearthed evidence of ways in which the work of dragomans was received by their clients.⁴¹

Sometimes the only available evidence can be found by studying ‘the translator’s role in mediating the values inscribed in the translation to its prospective readers’.⁴² In her study of retranslations and re-editions of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary and George Sand’s Le Mare au Diable in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, Sharon Deane-Cox considers prefatory, textual, and extratextual elements contributing to the production and reception of re-editions or retranslations. Prefatory discourses often provide evidence ‘for the type and extent of interactions between the (re)translations’. They also shed light on economic or symbolic motivations underpinning retranslation or re-editing, the agency of translators, printers, or editors, and the dynamics of the target literary system.⁴³ Unfortunately, scholars of premodern literature cannot always rely on extratextual material such as book reviews or book contracts, making it difficult to gauge the reception of retranslations or re-editions in the target literary field.

Another way of tracing translation relations upstream is to start from analysis of various versions of a translation, noting how the text evolved, what references were drawn on, what contributions there may have been from other translators, and how the text changed in the hands of revisers, editors, and printers. This is the work of ‘genetic criticism’, which is of interest to translation history to the extent that it can reveal relations between people over time.

Where one translation leans on or borrows from another, the processes of textual comparison can then be moved further upstream. Methods from forensic linguistics can be used to decide legal cases where one translator has been formally accused of plagiarising another.⁴⁴ Once again, however, the historical interest lies not so much in the details of the texts, but in the nature of the trust relations involved. If, in a particular cultural context, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, could a plagiarised translation be an expression of sincere trust in the previous translator?

In a study of nineteenth-century English novels translated into Chinese, China-based translation scholar Chuanmao Tian finds that the translations done in the 1990s liberally plagiarised those done in previous decades, and that the translations done in the 1950s were indeed more linguistically trustworthy than those of the 1990s.⁴⁵ Did the later translators simply put blind faith in the earlier ones? Probably the causes for these different approaches are more connected with the opening up of non-governmental publishing houses in China in the 1990s, the absence of effective copyright control, and the widespread study of English among the target readership. In China in the 1950s, there were relatively few translators, and they were highly trained and carefully vetted: translators were obliged to work for government publishers, and were usually in-house employees or university professors. In the 1990s, when nearly every university student knew at least enough English to translate in a basic way, and there were several commercial publishers, it became relatively easy to concoct a ‘new’ translation by drawing on old ones, and readers bought cheap translations at their peril.

As already mentioned, a key issue with upstream flows of trust is the lack of evidence. When this is the case, the only option for the historian of translation is to focus downstream, and devote special attention to the translator’s and interpreter’s rhetoric of trust-signalling or ethos building. It is to claims to ‘fidelity’—whether that of the translator (fidelis ) or the cultural broker (fidus ), as discussed in Chap. 1—that we now return.

‘Trust Me’: The Ethos of the Translator

The notion of ethos was first discussed, in the West, by Aristotle (fourth century BCE). In his treatise know as Rhetoric, Aristotle presents ethos as the author’s or the speaker’s ability to establish a trustworthy character, and thus as an effective means of persuasion.⁴⁶ Orators need to look morally correct in the eyes of their audience. According to Aristotle, they also need to demonstrate three key qualities: virtue, good sense, and goodwill, so that ‘anyone who is thought to have all three of these good qualities will inspire trust in his [sic] audience’. It is tempting to see correspondences between Aristotle’s discussion of the ethos and skills of the ancient speaker and the advice given to young students by Kongzi (Confucius, 551–479 BCE). Confucius tells young learners to be respectful towards their elders, to be ‘prudent and sincere’ (xín ), and, after cultivating these skills, to devote themselves to ‘refined studies’ (wén ). These ethical instructions anticipate the norms of prudence, honesty, good sense, and goodwill that have been recalled and reinterpreted by translators, interpreters, diplomats, orators, and authors throughout the Euro-American early modern era.⁴⁷

The ethos of communication and persuasion brings together almost all practitioners of rhetoric, from politicians through to literary authors. They share a communal ethos with their clients: this type of ethos is not based on personal relationships, but on ‘assumed friendly trust among those with shared education’.⁴⁸ In this context, however, translators and interpreters are particularly interesting because they are bound by a pre-existing text, or message, that needs to be translated for a new audience or readership. Translators work ‘translatively’ in the sense that their subjectivity is ostensibly hidden behind the main text and emerges in the liminal spaces of stylistic preferences, prefaces, footnotes, or reviews.⁴⁹ The translation history we are interested in examines these liminal spaces where the translators’ claims to trustworthiness are intended to meet the expectations of their readers and clients, and gain trust. Different cultures and societies make different assumptions about the roles and social functions of translators. The mismatch between trust claims, readers’ expectations, and perceived betrayal of regimes in some cases results in the persecution and death of the translator—see, for instance, William Tyndale’s death following his 1525 English translation of the Christian New Testament. A mismatch can also provide translators with an important role within specific professional contexts. Early in the history of psychoanalysis as a profession, undertaking to translate psychoanalytic studies provided many lay analysts (who were medically untrained) with a means to gain some standing in their growing professional networks.⁵⁰

Some regimes expect detachment or limited responsibility from the translator or interpreter: it is not the translator or interpreter who takes responsibility for the content of the message, but the first author or the patron. Other regimes emphasise the service provided by translators rather than the inherent value of the product, the text. By ‘service’ we mean a suite of relational values that are significant for the receiving culture: the prestige of the translated author or culture; nation-building by means of domestication of foreign texts and ideas, or social, cultural, and economic forms of capital for patrons, dedicatees, clients, readers, and translators themselves.

Translation history offers untapped sources of evidence for ways in which translators and other intercultural mediators strategically presented themselves, their work, and their projects to contemporary readers and patrons. In their addresses to readers and audiences, translators often underplayed their skills by using the rhetorical trope of modesty. In the preface to his 1803 translation of the Spanish classic Amadís de Gaula, Robert Southey warns the reader that ‘it cannot be supposed that I have uniformly succeeded [in his translation]’.⁵¹ In his preface to a two-volume translation from Dutch into Sinitic and square-form kana character New Writings on Calendrical Phenomena (1798–1802), Japanese interpreter Tadao Shizuki describes himself as ‘for the moment but a tongue man’. Setsujin (‘tongue man’) is a loan word from Chinese, and was used to describe interpreters who could translate from one or more ‘barbaric’ languages belonging to marginal Chinese tribes.⁵² These examples, chosen from two disparate contexts and cultures, show translators conventionally understating their own skills so as to convince their audience that their translation is not about proving their own skills and virtues, but about upholding the cultural significance of the start text and the readers’ learning.

Past translators’ self-deprecatory preambles could be rhetorically conventional, but the ultimate purpose was often to establish their trustworthiness as intercultural mediators. This is evident in Andrea Negroni’s 1594 petition to the Republic of Venice to be employed as the official dragoman following the death of Michiel Membré. In this letter, the interpreter reminds the government of his past loyal service:

we went to the Pasha, where I did what befitted my loyalty, and stated clearly against the Turkish adversaries

(quello, che conveniva alla mia fideltà, et con viva voce contra a li Turchi)[.]⁵³

Another example is Anne Locke’s 1590 translation of Calvinist Jean Taffin’s Des marques des enfans de Dieu, et des consolations en leurs afflictions, a work of spiritual reflection and comfort that was first published in 1584. Locke dedicated her translation to Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick, a supporter of Locke and a committed evangelical Protestant. Locke’s translation was motivated by political turmoil. Protestants were suffering from the religious wars raging in the Low Countries, and English Protestants were concerned that the same would happen in their country. This translation helped to support the Puritan cause.⁵⁴ Locke’s description of the translation as a ‘poore trauaile’, and as having been requested by someone is compounded by her hope that her ‘poore basket of stones’ would strengthen the walls of Jerusalem: a modest posturing underscoring an ambitious religious disposition.⁵⁵ Locke declares she has translated according to her duty (‘I haue according to my duetie’), thus aligning her self-presentation with the Aristotelian regimes of prudence and modesty.

In the foregoing examples, loyal service and duty are key claims made by translators and interpreters to assert their trustworthiness. Translation history has the potential make visible and interpret such strategies of persuasion, while also shedding light on the attitudes and expectations of translators and translations within and across cultures. In Chap. 1 we discussed the trust-signalling of Renaissance translators who made claims to be either fidelis (less skilled, subordinate to an authority) or fidus (trustworthy as an equal). Also in Chap. 1 we have noted comparable signalling by ancient Chinese translators. Here below we suggest that focussing on such rhetorical posturing and trust-signalling across cultural, linguistic, and social boundaries may point the way towards a history of translators’ visibility not yet written.

From Thick to Thin Trust? A New History of Translators’ Visibility

Translators’ roles and practices prove to be remarkably different across time and cultures. Considering such a diversity of conceptions and understandings of who translators are and what they do, perhaps the most productive way to learn about shifts of intercultural mediatory roles across history is to follow Marc Bloch’s now classic advice on comparative history: never link societies that are widely separated in time and space, and whose alleged similarities cannot be explained ‘by mutual influence or by a common origin’.⁵⁶

Translators and interpreters in the premodern Mediterranean world were learned or multilingual men and women who offered their skills to a patron, ruler, friend, or to agents of manuscript or print cultures (editors, printers, scribes). Face-to-face and written translations were often performed by the same people, and early modern European documents make no clear distinction between oral and written translation. Only from the sixteenth century onwards did ‘dragomans’ or ‘interpreters’ become distinct: the first term refers to official face-to-face interpreters employed, for instance, by the Venetian Board of Trade; the latter term described translators of written materials, and occasional or non-official (oral) interpreters.⁵⁷ In sixteenth-century Venice, several of the well-documented dragomans were captives and converts, but dragomans could also be members of well-off Venetian, Greek, or Ottoman families.

The professionalisation of interpreters is a relatively recent development in the long history of translation. By contemporary measures, it seems that premodern translators most closely approached some level of professional status in early modern China. Mongolian, Siamese, Persian, Burmese, and Muslim translators and interpreters, among others, worked in the Chinese imperial Translators’ College (Siyi guan) and Interpreters’ Station (Huitong guan) between 1407 and 1748. They were sourced from the Imperial Academy (Guozijian) or schools. All translators working in the College were subjected to an admission examination and some training.⁵⁸ At least two hundred years later, the interpreters who worked for Venetians baili (ambassadors based outside Venice) were apprenticed for several years before employment.⁵⁹ Translation formed an essential part of the training of speakers, politicians, intellectuals, and artists, especially in cities and towns of the Mediterranean world that sought to cultivate political and cultural independence. For instance, in sixteenth-century Italy, ‘interpreti e traduttori’ were defined as ‘teachers of languages’ (‘professori delle lingue’), and they were not distinguished from teachers, preachers, scholars, and everyday multilingual speakers.⁶⁰

Typically, today, a profession is established and recognised on the basis of self-definition and control over expertise or popularity. Modern professionals are ascribed recognised attributes, such as ‘high degree of systematic knowledge; strong community orientation and loyalty; self-regulation; and a system of rewards defined and administered by the community of workers’.⁶¹ Twenty years ago, Lawrence Venuti argued that, since the seventeenth century, Anglo-American translators progressively lost their visibility before their readers. The growing invisibility of translators fostered the inconspicuousness of the foreign culture and the fluency and accessibility of content.⁶² Yet not all translators are invisible, and not all cultures take the translator’s and interpreter’s invisibility for granted. In contemporary Iran, for instance, translators from English into Persian appear to have gained more cultural capital and social visibility than ever before.⁶³ Iran might be an exception, but it is a case that questions the linear history of invisibility suggested by Venuti. Indeed, possibly the smaller the language (contemporary Czech, for example), the greater the visibility of the main translators into that language: the names of translators stand a greater chance of appearing large type on book covers, and translators are more likely to be interviewed on television, for example, as commentators on what is happening in the major cultures. We know that the smaller the market for books in a particular language the greater the percentage of translations to non-translations in that market.⁶⁴ So when more than fifty per cent of the cultural products available are translations, some translators can become highly visible as opinion-makers, and the domain of translation can be an important cultural activity.⁶⁵

From the perspective of translation history, the professionalisation of cultural mediation appears to have traded individuality and visibility for professionalism and invisibility. Pushing this hypothesis further, it might not be true that translators’ agency is less visible today than in premodern Europe, especially if we look beyond Europe. It might simply be possible (hence worth exploring) that a different type of agency has progressively been made visible to the western client, namely the profession, the institution, and the publishing market as opposed to the personal skills, motivations, and claims of the translator. Behind the name of the translator, readers see the profession and the regimes of translation, followed by the approval of the publishing industry. The publishing industry invites the thin trust of the readers without any need for the translators to offer any personal detail beyond their names.

The point we are making here is that the alleged invisibility of translators in the West and in at least some parts of the East suggests that there are new narratives of translation to be written. These would benefit, we believe, from a turn towards the institutions and regimes of trust or distrust. In turn, this would make possible explorations of when and how, in translation history, the thick trust of interpersonal relationships (between translator and patron or reader) may have given way to institutional, thin trust—or the other way round, as suggested by the example from China discussed above. At least for the West, translation historians could seek to trace the ‘self-annihilation’ (Venuti’s word) that translators may have variously imposed upon themselves.⁶⁶

‘Professionalisation’ describes how the business of producing, transmitting, and receiving intercultural texts is driven by discrete and contextualised regimes and practices. Apart from at least one contemporary exception (Iran), professionalisation seems to have progressively restricted self-fashioning and persuasive strategies for the translating self.⁶⁷ Authors appeal to readers and publishing companies; translators tend to garner indirect connections with readers, and much more direct relations with clients such as publishing companies, governments, corporations, and translation and mediation services. The growing professionalisation of translators and interpreters is little considered in recent discussions about the translators’ invisibility.

Can professionalism and individualism coexist? Recent research has addressed this question, but more research is needed to understand historically professionalism and individualism.⁶⁸ As already mentioned, histories of translation in China and Japan suggest that professionalism was established there before Europe, and that professionalism and individualism coexisted. Translators from Chinese into Japanese in early-eighteenth-century Nagasaki constituted a community of professionals who inherited their position, and were recognised within the tightly controlled jurisdiction of the Tokugawa shogunate.⁶⁹ Certainly, a Japanese translator such as Kanzan Okajima (1674–1728) managed to exploit personal and social forms of capital while also performing translation and interpreting ‘professionally’. A different case is the already mentioned Translators’ College (Siyi guan) in China (1467–1748), where teamwork mattered more than individual effort or recognition. In premodern Europe, translators (who were often also authors, editors, teachers, students) used conventions such a modesty, or fidelity to a ‘hierarchy of production’ (God, ancient authors, medieval exegetes, and translator) to promote their work and trustworthiness.⁷⁰ In the history of western translation it seems that trust was based on personal trust before it could turn into institutional trust. The medieval accessus ad auctores that prefaces texts visualised the line of production and the reputation of the agents who contributed to the afterlife of the translated text. A difference, we suggest, between now and then, at least in the West and in some realms such as literature and history, is not so much that visibility might have turned into invisibility, but that the focus of attention has, in the course of centuries, shifted from the trustworthiness of non-professional authors or mediators to the trustworthiness of the profession. In western Europe, some four hundred years ago, the reader was asked to trust at least one member of the line of production, whereas today, at least in the West, the reader or listener tends to be asked to trust the profession with its implied codes of practice, training, and values. At stake in the present is not the reputation of the translator but the repute of the intersecting institutions that produce professional and high-quality translations: publishing companies, systems of formal training and accreditation for translators, and the regimes regulating translation and interpreting.

The invisibility of the western translator is therefore less significant with respect to trust. Industrial standards for language-service companies seek to ensure quality not by evaluating the product (the translation) but by regulating the production process, for example by requiring that all translations be reviewed by someone other than the translator. The product is assumed trustworthy if the industrial process has been followed correctly. Such standards also seek to regulate translators not in terms of personal skills but through reference to institutional training or certification. In the catalogue of International Standards, for example, for ISO17100 (2015) ‘Translation services’, all translators covered by the standard must have ‘a certificate of competence in translation awarded by an appropriate government body’.⁷¹ The ‘scandal’ of invisibility exposed by Venuti seems, from this perspective, a matter of increased institutional supervision that claims a global scope.