Much time and ink has been wasted attempting to differentiate between translations, versions, adaptations and the establishment of a hierarchy of 'correctness' between these categories. Yet the differentiation between them derives from a concept of the reader as the passive receiver of the text in which its Truth is enshrined. In other words, if the text is perceived as an object that should only produce a single invariant reading, any 'deviation' on the part of the reader /translator will be judged as a transgression. Such a judgement might be made regarding scientific documents, for example, where facts are set out and presented in unqualifiedly objective terms for the reader of SL and TL text alike, but with literary texts the position is different. One of the greatest advances in twentieth-century literary study has been the reevaluation of the reader. So Barthes sees the place of the literary work as that of making the reader not so much a consumer as a producer of the text, while Julia Kristeva sees the reader as realizing the expansion of the work's process of semiosis. The reader, then, translates or decodes the text according to a different set of systems and the idea of the one 'correct' reading is dissolved. At the same time, Kristeva's notion of intertextuality, that sees all texts linked to all other texts because no text can ever be completely free of those texts that precede and surround it, is also profoundly significant for the student of translation. As Paz suggests all texts are translations of translations of translations and the lines cannot be drawn to separate Reader from Translator.
Quite clearly, the idea of the reader as translator and the enormous freedom this vision bestows must be handled responsibly. The reader/ translator who does not acknowledge the dialectical materialist basis of Brecht's plays or who misses the irony in Shakespeare's sonnets or who ignores the way in which the doctrine of the transubstantiation is used as a masking device for the production of Vittorini’s anti-Fascist statement in Conversazioni in Sicilia is upsetting the balance of power by treating the original as his own property. And all these elements can be missed if the reading does not take into full account the overall structuring of the work and its relation to the time and place of its production. Maria Corti sums up the role of the reader in terms that could equally be seen as advice to the translator:
Every era produces its own type of signedness, which is made to manifest in social and literary models. As soon as these models are consumed and reality seems to vanish, new signs become needed to recapture reality, and this allows us to assign an information-value to the dynamic structures of literature. So seen, literature is both the condition and the place of artistic communication between senders and addressees, or public. The messages travel along its paths, in time, slowly or rapidly; some of the messages venture into encounters that undo an entire line of communication; but after great effort a new line will be born. This last fact is the most significant; it requires apprenticeship and dedication on the part of those who would understand it, because the hypersign function of great literary works transforms the grammar of our view of the world.
The translator, then, first reads/translates in the SL and then, through a further process of decoding, translates the text into the TL language. In this he is not doing less than the reader of the SL text alone, he is actually doing more, for the SL text is being approached through more than one set of systems. It is therefore quite foolish to argue that the task of the translator is to translate but not to interpret, as if the two were separate exercises. The interlingual translation is bound to reflect the translator’s own creative interpretation of the SL text. Moreover, the degree to which the translator reproduces the form, metre, rhythm, tone, register, etc. of the SL text, will be as much determined by the TL system as by the SL system and will also depend on the function of the translation. If, as in the case of the Loeb Classics Library, the translation is intended as a line by line crib on the facing page to the SL text, then this factor will be a major criterion. If, on the other hand, the SL text is being reproduced for readers with no knowledge either of the language or the socioliterary conventions of the SL system, then the translation will be constructed in terms other than those employed in the bilingual version. It has already been pointed out in Section 2 that criteria governing modes of translation have varied considerably throughout the ages and there is certainly no single proscriptive model for translators to follow.
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