Praise for a translated novel often takes a curious form. Reviewers commend a translation for reading "as if it had been written in English," as though the highest achievement available to a translator were to disappear. The ideal is an old one, and its appeal is easy to understand. Readers who pick up a translated book want the author, not an intermediary, and a translator who calls attention to herself can seem to be stealing a stage that belongs to someone else.

Yet the ideal of the invisible translator rests on an assumption that does not survive scrutiny: that there exists a single correct English version of the original, waiting to be uncovered, and that every departure from it is a distortion. No such version exists. A sentence in the source language may carry a pun, a regional flavor, an echo of scripture, and a rhythm that mimics a speaker's breathlessness, and English can rarely preserve all four at once. The translator must choose which to keep, and the choosing is not a mechanical procedure but an act of reading, an interpretation of what matters most in the passage. A translation that sounds effortlessly native has not avoided these choices; it has merely hidden them.

Hiding them has costs. When a translation smooths away every strangeness, readers lose the sense that they are encountering a different language and, often, a different way of organizing experience. A novel whose characters address one another through an elaborate system of honorifics may be rendered in plain, egalitarian English that reads smoothly and tells the reader almost nothing about the society it depicts. Dialect can suffer the same fate: a farmhand whose speech marks him as an outsider in the original may emerge in English sounding exactly like the lawyer who employs him, and a contrast the novelist built with care is gone. The fluency that reviewers reward can thus become a kind of quiet erasure, making distant books sound reassuringly local.

None of this means that translators should fill their pages with footnotes or preserve awkward syntax for its own sake. A translation that constantly advertises its own difficulty can become as self-absorbed as the invisible ideal is self-effacing, and readers have a legitimate claim to pleasure as well as instruction. The defenders of fluency are right that a translation which cannot be read with enjoyment has failed at something essential. They are wrong to conclude that enjoyment requires concealment.

What would a visible translation look like? It might keep a handful of untranslated words whose meaning becomes clear from context, so that readers feel the texture of the original without being stalled by it. It might allow a sentence to feel slightly foreign where the original felt slightly unusual even to its first readers. It might include a brief note in which the translator describes the largest choices she faced and explains how she resolved them. Above all, it would be read by critics who judged it not by whether they could forget the translator but by whether her decisions were intelligent ones.

The translator is in the room whether or not we acknowledge her. The only question is whether readers are told who has been speaking to them.