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Q: What's the difference between fidelity and transparency of a translation?
A: Fidelity (or "faithfulness") and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to strive for in a translation, particularly literary translations. These two ideals are often at odds thus leading a 17th-century French critic to coin the phrase, "les belles infidèles," to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.
Fidelity refers to the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning and otherwise without distorting it.
Transparency 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, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion, an "idiomatic translation." The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and translation quality usually depends on the correct balance of the two.
The criteria used to measure the faithfulness of a translation varies depending on the subject, the precision of the original content, the type, function and use of the text, its literary value, its social or historical context, etc.
The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation is more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong," and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often results in utter nonsense, thereby only of humorous value.
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source text. In doing so, they often deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Similarly, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color" or colloquialisms in the translation.
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