The illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of thetranslator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. Whatis so remarkable here is that this illusory effect conceals the numerousconditions under which the translation is made, starting with thetranslator’s crucial intervention in the foreign text. The more fluentthe translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, themore visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text.