All translations are more or less bad translations; for the ideal translation is one in which the symbols of the translation-language exactly reproduce for the translation-audience all and only those responses which the original symbols would elicit from the original intended audience, and this ideal is an impossible one outside the realm of formal languages. The translator in fact must walk a tight-rope between the fluent and the accurate, the elegant and the literal, the readable and the written; and this is a tightrope from which he must inevitably fall periodically into the saving net of compromise. All he can do in mitigation is to explain the principles he has striven to follow in seeking to meet the ultimately irreconcilable demands of fidelity to his author and concern for his public. Thus the endeavours of the humble translator, no less than those of the exalted poet, are never completed, only abandoned.
In translating the present work, I have been acutely conscious of handling material that was written to be spoken, and spoken in a teaching situation at that. This accounts for one detail of Durkheim’s style that I have sought to reproduce, namely his constant exploitation of synonymy: he will typically make a point by offering three synonymous (or nearly so) words or expressions for the key concept, as if he is deliberately allowing time for the point to be absorbed while at the same time offering the student different linguistic modes of access to the ideas he is seeking to convey. More generally, my awareness that I am dealing with the lecture-form, has led me on the whole and where irresoluble conflict occurs to opt for readability rather than strict technical but clumsy correctness. To render the lucid obscurely or the elegant ponderously is no less to do violence to an original than to distort matters of more obvious substance.
I have also made the general — and surely uncontroversial — assumption that there is little point in producing a translation for those who are in a position to criticise the translation rather than for those who are not so placed because they do not have the language of the original. This has involved me in a certain amount of vulgarisation, but then vulgarisation in the etymological sense is precisely what gives translation its point. More specifically, I have usually sought contemporarily intelligible equivalents for, for example, mediaeval Latin academic terms, and I have also translated words in foreign languages other than French.
Finally I have tried to produce a translation which can be read with profit and pleasure by people who have in common with Durkheim’s original audiences that they are young and that they are destined to become teachers and for whom, therefore, inspiration is no less important than information.