give him the original text and trust him to use his best judgment to provide a translation that reflects the original. Nowadays, with the ubiquitous usage of instant mass communications, Internet campaigns or traditional mass media, things have become more complicated.
When we covered the differences between machine and human translations, we assumed that you already decided to send your document to a translator, and not to a copywriter. Various comments we received since then indicate that the differences beftween copywriters and translators are not well understood. Therefore, here are some guides to the specifics of the translator's and copywriter's work respectively.
A translation must be faithful to the original text, yet transparent to the reader, inasmuch as the translation should not be perceptible. Thus, a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase “les belles infidèles” (the beautiful unfaithful women) to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.
Fidelity pertains to the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text. This means that it neither adds to nor subtracts from it, neither strengthens nor weakens any part of it, nor otherwise distorts it.
Transparency, on the other hand, pertains to the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language… in other words, how well it conforms to the target language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
