The task of the translator, to borrow the title of what is probably the twentieth century’s single most influential commentary about the goal of translation, is to create a text that improves upon the original. In all fairness to Walter Benjamin, this is not what he says in “The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin proposed that a good translation puts the same kind of pressure on the target language that the original puts on the source language, and so “to some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines.” To claim that a translator aims to improve the original text flies in the face not only of Benjamin’s idealism but also of conventional wisdom, which holds that translation is impossible from the outset. As John Ciardi once said, translation is “the art of failure.” That the quote is frequently misattributed to Umberto Eco seems to back the point.

Yet this clichéd wisdom has little bearing on reality. In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, David Bellos demonstrates many of the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our daily lives—from classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction manuals to poems—that if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say “je ne sais quoi.” The European Union, for example, has twenty-four official languages; every legal document within the EU has to be translated into all of them, and every official translation is legally the original. There is clearly a tension between the varieties of “translation” happening all around us—every moment of every day, truly one of the fundamental activities that hold our world together—and the persistent recycling of platitudes about how this activity, so basic and ubiquitous, is impossible. If the platitudes are recalled more often than translation’s pervasiveness, it is only because translators are usually invisible, their work mysterious. More.

See: The Nation

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