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As the goal of translation is to ensure that the source and the target texts communicate the same message while taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator, a successful translation can be judged by two criteria:

1. Faithfulness, also called fidelity, which is the extent to which the translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning; and

2. Transparency, which is the extent to which the translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.

A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion is said to be an "idiomatic translation". The two are not necessarily exclusive.

The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.

The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine translation systems, often result in patent nonsense with only a humorous value.

Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may knowingly strive to produce a literal translation. For example, literary translators and translators of religious works often adhere to the source text as much as possible. To do this they deliberately "stretch" the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language to provide "local colour" in the translation.

The concepts of fidelity and transparency are looked at differently in recent translation theories. The idea that acceptable translations can be as creative and original as their source text is gaining momentum in some quarters.

In recent decades, the most prominent advocates of non-transparent translation modes include the Franco-Canadian translation scholar Antoine Berman who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations (L’épreuve de l’étranger, 1984), and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti who called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones (see, for example, his 'Call to Action' in The Translator’s Invisibility, 1994).

Many non-transparent translation theories draw on concepts of German Romanticism, with the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of foreignization being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]", i.e. transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author] ", i.e. respecting the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher clearly favoured the latter. It is worth pointing out, however, that his preference was motivated not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign but was rather intended as a nationalist practice to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German literature.

The concepts of fidelity and transparency remain strong in Western traditions, however. They are not necessarily as prevalent in non-Western traditions. For example, the Indian epic Ramayana has numerous versions in many Indian languages and the stories in each are different from one another. If one looks into the words used for translation in Indian (either Aryan or Dravidian) languages, the freedom given to the translators is evident.