Where does transparency collide?

A property of matter: the ability to let light pass through so that objects behind can be seen, with little scattering or absorption. Newton's 1704 Opticks argued that whether a body is transparent or opaque depends on the arrangement of its parts and the tiny spaces between them, and that scattering at internal surfaces is what makes a body opaque. Bohren and Huffman's 1998 Absorption and Scattering of Light by Small Particles gave the modern account of how particles in a medium absorb and scatter light, which sets the limit on how transparent it can be. Here the referent is a physical property of matter, gauged by how much light gets through, and it is unrelated to a government open to its citizens, an expression that can be swapped for its value, or a translation that hides its translator.[1][2]

Unit

A material's transmittance, the fraction of incident light it passes

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured by spectrophotometry as transmittance across wavelengths, and by haze and clarity for scattering

The condition of a government whose decisions, records, and reasons are open to public view, so that citizens and outside observers can see what officials do and hold them to account. Bentham set out the principle in his 1791 Essay on Political Tactics, whose chapter Of Publicity argued that opening the workings of an assembly to view is the surest check on those who hold power. Meijer's 2013 Understanding the Complex Dynamics of Transparency treated it as a relationship in which one party can observe the inner workings of another, and mapped how governments and stakeholders build it. The referent is a property of institutions and their openness to scrutiny, not a property of matter, an expression in a program, or a translated text.[3][4]

Unit

An institution's openness, judged across its records, meetings, and decisions

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by disclosure laws, open-records access, and indices scoring what governments publish

A property of a context or expression: a part of a language or program is referentially transparent when it can be replaced by another that picks out the same thing without changing the meaning of the whole. Quine coined the term in his 1960 Word and Object to mark contexts in which two terms for the same thing may be swapped while keeping truth. Strachey carried it into computing in his 1967 lectures Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages, where an expression is referentially transparent if it can be replaced by its value, a property that functional programming later built on. The referent is a rule about substitution in logic and code, and it has nothing to do with light passing through matter, an open government, or a fluent translation.[5][6]

Unit

A property of one expression or context, holding or failing for it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Checked by whether substituting a co-referring term, or an expression's value, leaves meaning unchanged

A quality prized in a translated text: the translation reads so fluently in its new language that it seems not to be a translation at all, letting the reader look straight through to an apparent original while the translator stays out of view. Venuti named and criticised this ideal in his 1995 The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation, arguing that a fluent, domesticating style makes the translator invisible and hides the labour of translation. The referent is an effect of style and reception in a rewritten text, distinct from a see-through material, an accountable government, or a substitutable expression in a program.[7]

Unit

A quality of one translated text, from fluent to visibly translated

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by readers and critics through fluency, naturalness, and whether the text reads as an original