Irrespective of the fact that some philosophers or linguists claim there are no rules for deciding whether one translation is better than another, everyday activity in a publishing house tells us that it is easy to establish that a translation is wrong and deserves severe editing. Maybe it is only a question of common sense, but common sense must be respected.

Let us suppose that in a novel a character says, "You're just pulling my leg." To render such an idiom in Italian by 'stai solo tirandomi la gamba' or 'tu stai menandomi per la gamba' would be literally correct but misleading. In Italian, one should say 'mi stai prendendo per il naso', thus substituting an English leg with an Italian nose.

If literally translated, the English expression, absolutely unusual in Italian, would make the reader suppose that the character (as well as the author) was inventing a provocative rhetorical figure - which is completely misleading, as in English the expression is simply an idiom. By choosing "nose" instead of "leg", a translator puts the Italian reader in the same situation as the original English one.

Thus only by being literally unfaithful can a translator succeed in being truly faithful to the source text. Which is (to redeem the triviality of my example) like echoing Saint Jerome, patron saint of translators, that in translating one should not translate 'verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu' (sense for sense, and not word for word) - even though the notion of the right sense of a text can imply some ambiguities.

Now let us suppose that one has to translate "How now! A rat?" from Hamlet (Act III, Scene IV) into Italian. As far as I know, every Italian version translates it as 'Cosa c'è, un topo?' or 'Come? Un topo?' A rigorous translator should check in an old dictionary whether in Shakespeare's time "rat" meant, as Webster's says today, "any of numerous rodents (Rattus and related genera) differing from the related mice by considerably larger size and by structural details", adding that a "rat" can also be "a contemptible person"; (and that to "smell a rat" means to realise that there is a secret plot).

In fact, Shakespeare, at least in Richard III, used "rat" as an insult. However, in Italian the word 'ratto' has no connotation of "contemptible person", and rather suggests (though improperly) speed ('ratto' as an adjective means "speedy"). Moreover, in every situation in which someone is frightened by a rodent (when, according to a vaudeville tradition, women jump upon a chair and men grasp a broom to kill the intruder) the usual scream is 'un topo!' and not 'un ratto!'

I would decide that Hamlet, in order to kill Polonius, did not need to know if there was a "mouse" or a "rat" behind that arras, and that the word 'topo' accurately suggests surprise, instinctive alarm, and an impulse to kill. For all these reasons I accept the usual translation: 'Cosa c'è? Un topo?'  If ... it is indispensable to make the size of the rodent clear, and it had to be a rat, for Hamlet it is more important to stress the animal's sudden passage and the nervous reaction it elicited.

Thus we have negotiated which portion of the expressed content was strictly pertinent in that given context. Between the purely theoretical argument that, since languages are differently structured, translation is impossible, and the commonsensical acknowledgement that people, after all, do translate and understand each other, it seems to me that the idea of translation as a process of negotiation (between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encyclopedias of two cultures) is the only one that matches our experience.

My example has to do with my cat, Harriet.  Sort of.