I thought that Venderschelden's article on the authority of translation was really interesting. The author of the article made some good points on both sides of the argument, about translators losing their autonomy to direct authorial control, but the usefulness of author collaboration. I agree more with the side of the usefulness of author collaboration, because as I have said in past posts, I do not believe in a translator's full autonomy over a text that is not their own. I believe that while a translator should take into account their own cultural context when translating, ultimately, if they wanted to translate a work different from the one they chose, then they should have chosen a different work. Of course, this is not my perspective on translating poetry -- because I think poetry is a very subjective art and seeing different translator interpretations of poetry is very interesting, as poets often write poetry for the sake of individual interpretation -- in this post I am only talking about prose. Authors who write prose often write with a very specific goal in mind, and for a translator to sway from that goal through their own interpretation of the text is to forsake the original work and essentially create a whole new piece of literature, unfaithful to the source text. In my opinion, I see no point in translating if someone's goal isn't to reproduce a work in the target language while staying true to the original and working to bring the same effect to the audience that the original text had. I believe direct author-translator dialogue is very important to translation, especially to ask about meaning and nuance to specific parts of the work. I do not think that translators relying on authors' perspectives is a bad thing, though I do agree that perhaps the translators should wait until their draft is done to start collaborating with the author, so they are not overly stressed about the author judging their work while in the process of translating.
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