The example of the pun is used to illustrate that

humour is the most difficult element of a text to translate.

translators should avoid works that depend heavily on wordplay.

the effect of a passage on its first readers cannot be reconstructed.

fidelity to sense and fidelity to effect can require opposite decisions.

The author concludes that "faithful" does not name a property of a translation but

a quality that only readers of the original can assess.

a decision about which of several competing losses to accept.

a standard that changes with each literary period.

an ideal that the best translators occasionally achieve.

According to the passage, a reviewer who convicts a translation of infidelity has often

compared it against a rival version rather than against the original.

failed to consult the translator's stated principle.

identified an error that the translator would readily concede.

discovered only that it made a different choice than the reviewer would have.

It can be inferred that the translator's preface has become conventional because it

lets a reader see which fidelity was chosen and where the loss fell.

reduces the amount that is lost in the translation.

protects the translator against accusations of inaccuracy.

allows publishers to compare rival translations of the same work.

The author regards the durability of the fidelity dispute as

evidence that translation theory has made little progress since Jerome.

a consequence of the difficulty of comparing languages.

a sign that the terms in which it is conducted are defective.

proof that neither side has ever produced a convincing argument.

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The Fidelity Problem in Translation

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

The oldest argument in translation is about how closely a translator should follow the original. Jerome, defending his practice in the fourth century, distinguished rendering word for word from rendering sense for sense, and every generation since has restaged the quarrel in its own vocabulary. The party of fidelity holds that a translator's duty is to the author; the party of freedom holds that a version nobody can read has failed whatever its accuracy. The dispute has proved remarkably durable, and its durability is itself a clue that something in its framing is wrong. The trouble is that fidelity has no single object. A translator may be faithful to the literal sense of the words, to their register, to their sound, to the effect the passage had on its first readers, or to the position the work occupies within its own literature — and these obligations compete rather than combine. A pun rendered faithfully in sense stops being funny, so a translator faithful to the effect must invent a different pun and be unfaithful to the words. A poem that preserves the original metre will distort the diction; one that preserves the diction will lose the metre. What looks like a single virtue admitting of degrees turns out to be a set of incompatible virtues among which a choice must be made. "Faithful" therefore does not name a property a translation either has or lacks. It names a decision about which loss to accept. This has a practical consequence for how translations are read and judged. A reviewer who convicts a version of infidelity has often only discovered that it made a different choice than the reviewer would have made, which is a preference rather than a fault. The more useful questions are whether the translator has been consistent in the choice and open about it, and it is largely for this reason that the translator's preface setting out a governing principle has become a convention of serious literary translation. What such a preface offers is not a smaller loss. It is a reader who can see where the loss fell.

The passage is primarily concerned with