Notion ambiguë qui peut prendre deux acceptions fondamentalement opposées en fonction de l’image qui en est à la racine. Quand elle est orientée en direction de l’original, elle qualifie une traduction qui laisse transparaître l’original dans son étrangeté. Quand elle est orientée en direction du lecteur, elle qualifie une traduction qui se laisse facilement pénétrer par le regard du lecteur au point de lui donner l’impression qu’il lit un texte initialement rédigé dans sa langue.

1- La polémique de Venuti contre le régime de transparency a le mérite d’attirer notre attention sur le revers de la médaille : la transparence montre et dissimule en même temps, la vision qu’elle permet va de pair avec l’invisibilité, l’apparition avec la disparition. C’est pourquoi la charge positive habituellement attachée à cette image est dénoncée comme une illusion chez Venuti, dans la mesure où elle se révèle faire écran à des phénomènes de domination culturelle.

2- L’idéal des traductions pragmatiques réside dans leur transparence et leur caractère idiomatique. 

Les deux acceptions fondamentalement opposées de la notion “transparence” se manifestent dans les versions anglaise et française du roman Immeuble Yacoubian d’Alaa El Aswany. 

Ambiguous concept that describes the process, i.e., the act of translating, when it refers to the muted presence of the translator who strives to produce a text that does not read like a translation, and that is applied to the product, i.e., the translation itself, which conveys the alien nature or foreignness of the source text.

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1- Transparency of the translation process is normally associated with domestication, whilst transparency of the product has exoticisation as a possible correlation, but surely this exoticisation is no more than cultural bias.

2- In linguistic approaches to translation, the term transparency, although it tends to be only mentioned in a cursory fashion, usually refers to the product: Vinay & Darbelnet (1977) speak of the transparency of the target text regarding the source text, and Newmark, with specific reference to the procedures used when translating the names of institutions, opposes transparency to opaqueness. He claims that “transparency may be defined as the source language term ‘shining through’ the corresponding target language term, thereby resembling it closely in form” (Newmark, 1981: 78).

The commented examples in are taken from Naguib Mahfouz’s epic novel Malhamat al-Harafish, first published in Arabic in 1977, and the translations La Chanson des Gueux, in French by France Douvier Meyer (published by Denoël in 1989) and The Harafish in English, translated by Catherine Cobham (published by Doubleday in 1994).

The fluid English text does not constantly remind the reader of the foreignness of the original. However, the French translation does convey its own impression of transparency vis-à-vis the original. Its transliteration of Arabic terms which refer to religious events, and to the Coptic calendar used by Mahfouz to refer to the rhythm of the seasons, as in the Egyptian vernacular, is complemented by explanatory footnotes, as shown below:

These examples illustrate the interdependence of the visibility of the process, as demonstrated by the French text with its frequent recourse to footnotes, and the transparency of the product. The emphasis on transparency of product in the French means that the source is not hidden in a ‘domesticated’ narrative. It is perhaps at this junction that the interdependence of the visibility of the process (i.e., the use of footnotes in the French translation) and the transparency of the product (the source literally shines through in this text) is most apparent. Thus, if transparency is taken to mean reflection of the original, the reverse is true of the English translation where the invisibility of the translator, or the illusory transparency of the process, results in a non-transparent product.