Spivak on the Politics of Translation
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argued that English translations of third-world women's literature too often produced what she called translatese: a smoothed, deracinated English that erased the rhetoricity of the source.
Rhetoricity vs logic
Spivak distinguished the logic of a text (paraphrasable propositional content) from its rhetoricity (the texture that ties the text to a specific culture, language, and politics). Translation that preserves logic but flattens rhetoricity reduces the source to information, which is precisely what readers of literature do not want.
For AI translation
Generic LLM translation optimises for paraphrasable accuracy, which is logic. It tends to flatten rhetoricity unless the framework explicitly preserves it (foreignization, formal equivalence, source-cultural marker retention). Spivak's argument is the political case for not making domestication the universal default.
Further reading: foreignization vs domestication, Tymoczko.