Fidelity and Translating Spanish

Fidelity: that's an interesting concept. Usually we tend to equate fidelity with faithfulness and when we judge something (or someone) in terms of that quality, we either say they are or they're not. There's usually no in-between.

But that all seems to change when we talk about translating Spanish or translation in general. With language translation there's no clear decarmation between a faithful and an unfaithful translation. There are usually degrees of faithfulness and one of the main issues a translator has to deal with is how faithful should he/she be to a translation.

I recently read an article in the Chicago Tribune about a translator who was commissioned to translate a book into Galician. The book's publisher ended up firing the translator after they checked the translation and discovered that the female translator changed all the masculine and neutral articles to the female gender.

The translator defended herself by saying that "the translation strategies I use include not using the masculine form systematically." But the editor of the book claimed that she was biasing the work by purposely changing the genders when they were clearly marked. The editor also said that ultimately the translator's contract specified fidelity to the original work and the translator breached that.

So clearly it would seem that the translator broke the contract by deciding to change the gender. But what happens when there is no clear indication of that and the translator is left to choose the result, which is often the case when translating Spanish? In that context, faithfulness in the eyes of one editor might be very different in the eyes of another.

And that is just one of the battles language translators face on a daily basis.