In short, the concept of invisibility seems to me absurd in the context of translating languages and cultures very different from English, such as Chinese. In order to get a natural effect in English, the translator has to do things like gloss cultural references, re-order sentences within a paragraph or clauses within a sentence. That makes the translator an active re-writer. Most readers and publishers would think that Venuti’s view that the translator should consciously and publically breech invisibility by sticking closer to the original text, was off-the-wall. But the idea did not originate with him. It is fascinating to discover that the writer Virginia Woolf actually urged her woman writer friend Ling Shu-hua, in 1938 “…Do not mind how directly you translate the Chinese into English… come as close to the Chinese both in style and meaning as you can… [then, if the grammar is corrected] it might be possible to keep the Chinese flavor and make it both understandable yet strange for the English.”^[1]

Coming back to your first comment in this question, of course translation IS a form of authorship, as anyone who has translated from Chinese will know in their bones/guts/heart. And the better and richer the original work, the greater the obligation on the translator to “author” its complexity into English.

What difficulties — or challenges — does a translator face when it comes to authenticating a text?

As a translator, I find that I often have to adopt different language styles/registers within the same text, to match what the author has done. For instance, in Gold Mountain Blues, Zhang Ling’s chief hero and heroine write rather formal letters to each other in nineteenth-century Chinese style. The labourers talk to each other using Cantonese slang and swearwords. And the Canadian-Chinese descendant speaks contemporary Chinese and Canadian English. I had to find a range of English to make the whole family saga sound authentic.

Sometimes you have to hope that the reader will get the overall effect from the whole translation, even if they haven’t taken in every detail…

There’s another aspect of the “authentic” issue: in translations from Chinese, there are likely to be terms, describing anything from objects of daily use to culturally-specific concepts, which need to be made clear so that the translation sounds authentic. Anthony Pym has a nice phrase to describe these unknowns: “culture-bumps.” The reader will find the translation a bumpy ride if there are too many unknowns or if, conversely, the unknowns are explained at too much length. Sometimes you have to hope that the reader will get the overall effect from the whole translation, even if they haven’t taken in every detail of, for instance, village architecture or the village Party structure.