ABSTRACT
A translator should take reader interests into account. Intelligibility is the reader interest which takes priority when translating a philosophical text. If a text is systematic and the translation blurs its systematicity, its intelligibility is also compromised. The systematic nature of TMS seemed to me manifest (as it still does today). Essential to a systematic work is a consistent terminology. I therefore considered it important to preserve this terminological rigour. To this end, I made an effort to keep my translation as uniform as possible. It often happens that a translator, to avoid repetitions or for other stylistic
reasons, fails to translate a word uniformly. If the word in question is theoretically irrelevant and a deviation from uniformity makes the translation more elegant, this choice may be laudable. If a word plays a theoretical role in the text to be translated, however, translating that word with two or more different words or phrases makes the translation less intelligible and obviously misleading. The ideal uniformity is a one-to-one correspondence between the theoretically
relevant translated words and the correspondent translating words: if the translation is from English into Italian, the same Italian word Y in the translation should always correspond to each occurrence of the relevant English word W in the original text and every occurrence of Y in the translation should correspond to an occurrence of W in the original text. Of course, the policy of ideal uniformity is limited by certain contextual constraints imposed by the target language. For example, the English word feeling should in many contexts be translated by the word sensazione. Were this true in all contexts, uniformity could be fully respected: the Italian sensazione would translate feeling and the Italian sentimento would translate the English sentiment. But sensazione can have physical, bodily overtones that sentimento lacks. As a consequence, there are contexts where we cannot use sensazione without undesired effects, and where sentimento is clearly a far better translation of feeling. These contexts necessitate a deviation from uniformity.
