Introduction

We have so far been looking at the process of translation. Now let us look at the person behind a translation – the figure of the translator. It is an interesting paradox that the translator is largely ignored or is invisible in the debates that centre on translation. Where do we start our discussions about her?
The concept of the ‘invisible’translator was first propounded by a prominent translation studies scholar Lawrence Venuti. He was drawing attention to a translation process that did not pay much attention to the translator who facilitates translation. All of us are familiar with the name of Tolstoy, but not the translator who made it possible for us to read that work in a language we know and understand. Venuti is of the view that this is because the prime quality that is valued in a translation is fluency, so that target language readers never feel that they are reading a foreign text. The translator sees to it that the text is‘transparent’,or scrubbed clean of all the linguistic peculiarities that characterize a particular language or author and reads well and idiomatically. This creates an illusion of the translation being an original text. As Venuti puts it: “The more fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text” (The Invisibility of the Translator 2).Venuti is of course considering the Anglo-American culture, but this is true of the Indian context as well. The layman’s perception of a good translation is that it reads easily and fluently, making you forget that you are reading a translation. This is perhaps the reason why you would think of Saratchandra Chatterjee as a Hindi writer or Sundara Ramaswamy who writes in Tamil as a Malayalam writer.Venuti is attempting to bring the hidden translator to light, by analyzing the workings of the process called translation.