There's a book with the title Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. There are some valuable chapters in it, and I teach from it occasionally. But nothing there quite covers the odd position I got myself into the other day, which to me reflects the painfully ethical bit about translation.

My friend Georg had written a piece in German that was accepted by a journal, but on condition that he translate it into English. He was about to decline, but I pushed him to accept, and said we'd sit down and hammer out a draft together which he could submit.

Georg's English is better than my German. He could have written the piece in English, but as he said, this would involve rethinking the whole article, and he didn't have the time to do it. We sat down and translated about two-thirds of the article, with him reading a sentence out loud, me speaking and typing the corresponding English sentence, and then both of us circling back to fix the words, phrases and paragraphs.

Then Georg had to leave on a trip. I promised to e-mail him the rest and handle correspondence with the journal. I trudged through the last third of the translation on my own, letting the style be a little over-literal as a safeguard against a tendency I notice in myself to rewrite everything until it sounds like something I might have written.

Two months later, Georg gets the proofs from the journal and is appalled. The last third of the article is written in an impossibly stilted English that doesn't reflect how he thinks he wants to sound. (“I tell you, the translation of my writing should always read as if it had been written in English from the start!”) There are, inevitably, a couple of serious mistakes created by my failure to check the dictionary, which then linked up in a plausible misunderstanding that I wrote down. Georg now thinks he will look like a fool and that his reputation will be damaged. He also points out-- and I agree-- that the way you write, narrate, argue and cite in German is characteristic of that language and that academic milieu, and that to do what he wanted, I would really have had to rewrite wholesale paragraphs and sections. But I didn't feel I had the authority to do that. So nobody is quite happy with what had started out as a well-intended exercise in international communication.

We could, of course, blame the problem on a technical slip-up. Georg tells me that he can't proofread from a screen, so the emailed draft version sailed right past him without corrections and into the hands of the journal editor. But neither of us are quite satisfied with having it be a technical foul: for me, that would underrate the seriousness of my attempt to put Georg, qua Georg, into English, and for Georg, I think it means letting me off the hook too easily in a way that still doesn't repair the damage done to his authorial personality.

If Georg can catch some of the mistakes in proof, that will still leave big areas of style and presentation uncorrected, and nobody would think that the piece originated in English. I of course am pained to have disappointed my friend, and chastened to find that the Wörterbuch is still necessary after all these years of knocking around with German.

This isn't exactly what is referred to by the old adage “traduttore, traditore.” It was actually the attempt to avoid undue appropriation (the translator's typical vice) that led to the disaster. The painful part centers on the problem that's specifically ethical here, the need to speak for and in the name of someone who can't speak for himself. (If Georg were perfectly ignorant of English, he might be happy with the translation no matter what it was like; but that would just mean I get an ethical free ride.) Another characteristic of ethical discourse, the “would-should” turbulence, arises from Georg's wish to be represented in English as if he had done the thinking and writing in English: this necessarily gives the translator some freedom, but also some burdens of conscience that wouldn't be there if the rule for generating this translation had just been “open your Duden and copy down the first English equivalent given there for every German word, then patch up the grammar.”

Ethical situations are awkward: far easier to have a mechanical solution where nobody is responsible, or else a genuinely democratic one, where Georg gets to choose his own English and take the rap for it. In translation, where “meaning” is the doubtful quarry we are trying to conjure up with our imperfect spells and tokens, it doesn't do any good to say “I meant well.”