Friday, April 06, 2012

The Next Generation of Translators

I teach in an MA program in literary translation. Every year, students come in, expecting that once they have their MAs, they will be able to work full-time as translators of poetry or plays or whatever else. Every year, a number of students come in, sneering at people who translate users’ manuals or cookbooks or financial reports and vowing never to be one of them.

I suppose I see part of my job as informing students about the market for literary translation and about being realistic with them. An MA in literary translation will help them, of course, but it will not automatically enable them to support themselves by translating novels. Very few people – even well established, highly talented translators – can live off their literary translation work.

I also point out to my students that many people combine literary translation with other kinds of translation or with teaching or editing or research or work in the charity sector or work at banks and so on. I tell them how stimulating I personally find it to combine different types of translation and how it helps improve my language skills and my translation skills and also teaches me about new topics.

Most of the time, the students are definitely not convinced. Maybe it’s because they’re young (for the most part) and idealistic and think that everything can and will just be handed to them. Maybe they genuinely think they are too good for anything but translating song lyrics and memoirs. Maybe they don’t want to think about the fact that they will have to work hard in order to have a career in translation. Maybe they don’t have any money worries and have relatives who will support them as they translate short stories. Maybe there’s something else going on.

Of course I feel a bit hurt and shocked at the way they mock anything other than literary translation (one student actually said, “I would never lower myself to translate cookbooks!” even after I had mentioned how many cookbooks I have translated). But more importantly, I worry about what will happen when these students go out into the “real world”, armed with their MAs in literary translation, expecting to be able to support themselves on such work. I try to give them hints about how to improve their chances, and I organize talks with the Careers Centre on campus, and I talk to the students about practical matters such as writing a CV, networking, building a website, signing up with agencies, getting mentoring, and so on. So I try to do the best I can as a teacher and fellow translator.

But some students are resistant and only want to talk about translation theory. Some yawn as I suggest book fairs they might want to attend and how they can exchange business cards with editors and publishers. Some even criticize me, saying that I am negative and make them worry about what will happen next. So it’s a matter of trying to gently be realistic with them, to the best of my ability, hoping something that will sink in, while also continuing to encourage them.

What tips do you have for working with the next generation of translators?

22 comments:

Judy Jenner and Dagmar Jenner said...

Great stuff indeed, dear B.J. These students are incredibly lucky that they have such a thoughtful professor -- but we are quite appalled to hear how far removed from reality some of your students are. This isn't 1970, so there is PLENTY of information out there about the reality of literary translation. It's mind-boggling that students could make it to an MA program and still have the completely unrealistic expectation of working-full time in literary translation (of all specializations!) upon graduation. It's quite astonishing. Luckily for them, many universities have introduced courses on the practical side of translation. Those who don't think that translation is a business -- what else is it? -- are in for a rude awakening, and bless your heart for trying to communicate this essential information to them. How sad that some react negatively. However, these are probably the students who will quickly realize that they will have to take a job at a bookstore just to pay their bills while they aspire to be full-time literary translators of literary heavyweights right out of the gates. Personally, we only know a few literary translators who translate literature full-time. Everyone else is proud and happy to mix and match -- websites, brochures, yes, cook books!

When we get invited to speak to university students about how to run a translation business, we are usually quite pleasantly surprised about how savvy they are. Most understand that they have to start building the business while still in school. However, perhaps they are more receptive to what we have to say because we are the guest speakers versus the professor? (not sure why, but perhaps). We try to give them a realistic overview of the real life of a full-time translator. It's better that they hear what it entails now than 10 years later. Sadly, we've seen several studies indicating that many T&I graduates don't work in the field -- perhaps those are the folks who roll their eyes when their professor suggest they head to book fairs and start handing out business cards.

You do, professor Epstein! You are doing a great service to the industry and to your students by sharing this info -- even if they don't want to hear it.

John Barlow said...

Yes!

My last few: an architect's CV; an essay on Greek gods; some guidelines for nurses. No cookbooks, though...

Carolyn Y. said...

I am one of the next generation of translators, and I am sorry to hear how snooty my cohort can be! I wonder-- do these students feel the same way after a whole MA program's worth of translating the same type of document? I often do op-ed pieces, and sometimes the "lowly" office correspondence and newsletters I get come as a relief. It's nice to exercise my brain and work on something different.

Also, if you ever get a cookbook that you don't have the time or the language to translate, send it my way! Cooking is one of my greatest passions, next to translation. How great would it be to combine the two???

Mago said...

It seems to be a ‘truth’ acknowledged among academic translators that literary translation is the highest form of translation—thus it only makes sense that they attract like-minded students and/or transmit this mindset to them.

I am glad to have come to translation from another path—not the academic route—so that I have appreciated and enjoyed from the outset the creativity, art and satisfaction involved in so-called non-literary translation.

B.J. Epstein said...

Thanks for all your comments!
Mago, I agree that some people (whether academics or literary translators or book reviewers, etc) look down on non-literary translation. That's such a shame, because it can be really stimulating, educational work, and the reality is that most people will end up doing non-literary translation, even if that's not what they intended or set out to do. My university has two MA programs in translations -- one is run by the literature department and is in literary translation and the other is run by the languages and communication studies department and is in non-literary translation. The two MA programs do have join seminars every other week, but other than that, there's little overlap, and that's too bad as there could be a lot of fruitful discussions there. But I do want to say that I do my best not to transmit the "literary translation is the highest form of translation" mindset to my students, because I don't believe that's the case. And there's where some of these difficulties arise, I suppose.
Judy and Dagmar, I think young people don't always want to hear about "reality". Another translator and I were discussing this on Twitter yesterday and we wonder if young people just starting out on their careers would rather have a rosy view than a realistic one, so they don't despair too much. Personally, I'd rather be armed with as much info as possible, but apparently some students don't feel that way.
So I wonder, then, how can I best help them without making them feel too worried/unhappy.

Best wishes,
BJ

Sarah Alys said...

"Lower" themselves?! That's not merely naive; it's plain old inexcusable. (Also, take it from somebody in the TV & film industry--a student who thinks *cookbooks* constitute lowering oneself has obviously never considered the fact that pornography gets localized on a regular basis. :P)

Personally, though I focus on TV, film, novels, and other fiction works, I find that some of the most satisfying work I do is on birth certificates. It's not that I don't like working in arts and entertainment; it's that when I translate a birth certificate, I have the sort of pure satisfaction that can only come from providing something another person genuinely *needs.* Literary translation can make the world more beautiful, but other kinds of translation can make the world more navigable.

And also, in your case, tastier. ^_~

B.J. Epstein said...

I agree, Alys. It's so nice to know we are genuinely helping people who need it.

Re: pornography, I have mentioned to my students that there is work subtitling or localized porn, and that created an interesting discussion about whether they would take such jobs. In other sessions, we spoke about similar issues of personal ethics and what sorts of jobs we would take under which conditions. But one student complained to me, "Why do we talk about ethics? It has nothing to do with translation." Sigh.

Best wishes,
BJ

Yael Cahane said...

As another member of the future generation (I've been working as a translator for a little over four years), I'm shocked! I've never wanted to do literary translations, as I'm not the type (although I love reading, of course), and I'd be happy to translate recipes, which can be very challenging.
I love translating different texts every week about different topics, and I find it very refreshing.
In his book Is That A Fish in Your Ear? David Bellows claims that specialized non-literary translation is on a higher level compared to literary translation as it requires deep understanding of the material and the field. I find this view refreshing, but I think that each translation field has its own challenges and rewards.

Yael Cahane said...

As another member of the future generation (I've been working as a translator for a little over four years), I'm shocked! I've never wanted to do literary translations, as I'm not the type (although I love reading, of course), and I'd be happy to translate recipes, which can be very challenging.
I love translating different texts every week about different topics, and I find it very refreshing.
In his book Is That A Fish in Your Ear? David Bellows claims that specialized non-literary translation is on a higher level compared to literary translation as it requires deep understanding of the material and the field. I find this view refreshing, but I think that each translation field has its own challenges and rewards.

Yael Cahane said...

As another member of the future generation (I've been working as a translator for a little over four years), I'm shocked! I've never wanted to do literary translations, as I'm not the type (although I love reading, of course), and I'd be happy to translate recipes, which can be very challenging.
I love translating different texts every week about different topics, and I find it very refreshing.
In his book Is That A Fish in Your Ear? David Bellows claims that specialized non-literary translation is on a higher level compared to literary translation as it requires deep understanding of the material and the field. I find this view refreshing, but I think that each translation field has its own challenges and rewards.

Yael Cahane said...

As another member of the future generation (I've been working as a translator for a little over four years), I'm shocked! I've never wanted to do literary translations, as I'm not the type (although I love reading, of course), and I'd be happy to translate recipes, which can be very challenging.
I love translating different texts every week about different topics, and I find it very refreshing.
In his book Is That A Fish in Your Ear? David Bellows claims that specialized non-literary translation is on a higher level compared to literary translation as it requires deep understanding of the material and the field. I find this view refreshing, but I think that each translation field has its own challenges and rewards.

Yael Cahane said...

Sorry about the multiple comments - I've had some technical issues while posting.

B.J. Epstein said...

Thank you for your comment, Yael. I agree that you have to learn a lot about many different subjects in order to do specialized non-literary translations. To name just a few, I've translated texts on astronomy, eggs, plants (and Carl Linnaeus), textiles, music, tourism, etc. It's been fascinating and I've learned so much!

Best wishes,
BJ

MartiƱo said...

This is interesting. I've worked as a freelance translator, I am a localization project manager now and also have an MA in translation and started a PhD as well. After all those experiences I've realized the same thing, many translators don't really understand how the real life of a translator is. And probably many of those translators that despise translators who translate cookbooks won't have the guts to live as a freelance translator for their whole lives. From my point of view, the art of translation does not reside in what you translate, but in the act of translating itself. We all now how creative and crafted you need to be in order to come up with good solution in your everyday work as a translator, no matter what you translate. It can be a technical translation, an art book, an interview, a manual. And only the translators that see their job as an art, beyond whatever they're translating, are the ones that will actually be good and successful translators. For the rest, time and the real world will put them in the right place.

Choppa said...

Well, as a literature pro I rarely read anything if I don't get paid to do so. Literature as a higher form of existence is nonsense. And how many litwits actually know the kind of people who generate the books they worship (or how much of the actual creation is done by the editor?)
Telling stories (lit) and talking about stuff (non-lit) is basic human behaviour. Industrial division of labour (genre and function madness) and obscurantist fetishizing of the processes of telling and talking ("genius") conceal this, the way fashion conceals bodies.
Our society is still so primitive that sharing ideas and stories as effectively as possible with as many people as possible appears to be an almost insurmountable challenge, best left to hooded sorcerers stirring cauldrons in emerald palaces.
As long as elite specialists are thought to be the only ones who are any good at anything, the rest of us will feel like failures.
And in the face of this ideological pressure realistic career advice won't help much.
What we need is a society where our necessities are secure so we can do what we want to do without thinking about the money. What we have now is a society where we think about the money first and doing what we want to do is a severely constrained afterthought.
On a more upbeat note, the industrialization of translation (in all kinds of ways including "deskilling" ie devaluing the work of translators by getting higher education to pump out armies of the creatures) has brought ideas and stories in other languages into the everyday experience of more people than ever before.
I'd go easy on your charges when it comes to the truth, BJ - they can't handle it ;-)

Kevin Hendzel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kevin Hendzel said...

Just think of all the fun you'll have 10 years from now when your former students come back to share the stories of how their professional lives actually turned out. On that day you can all sit together, laugh, shake your heads and toast to the folly of youth.

The one or two who are making a serious living in commercial translation of any kind at all can pay for the drinks. Since you will be one of those two, that will leave one of your former students to pitch in. :)

I confess that I'm a bit astonished that they could be so snooty about literary translation. There is great virtue in literary translation to be sure, but is the thinking that poetry or literature are in some way more honorable or intellectually compelling than translating for a physician (to save a life) or in a court (to keep the innocent out of jail) or on the US - Russian Presidential Hotline (to prevent global thermonuclear war)? Or are all those things just simple abstractions to them?

It's very important to communicate right now that they need to learn as much about life as they can, and it best be in a subject somebody out there is interested in paying for. So pick something in science, technology, law, finance, banking, whatever they like.

At Georgetown, all the pure language majors gave up on language and translation after graduation and went to work in sales for IBM. I'm quite serious. It was the students who knew something else very well -- pick any subject you like -- that made careers out of translation and language because it's what's said in those languages that people are willing to pay for.

Honestly, the world needs another translation of Pushkin in about the same measure that it needs more carbon dioxide.

Annie said...

As a former student and one of this so-called snooty new generation of aspiring literary translators, I'd like to explain a few things, as I see it from my (or "our") perspective. I personally don't consider any form of translation "higher" than any other, and didn't choose literary translation because I considered it "better" than for example legal, cookbook, or other translation fields. Rather, I wanted to study literary translation in more depth because literature was my specialism (in the same way as law, medicine, music or cookery could be another's specialism). Had I been equally interested in all those fields, I would have chosen to do a general translation course - one that includes a wide variety of texts and focuses largely on business and technical texts as well as on other skills and texts that one might come across, for example, if working for a translation agency.
But I chose Literary Translation because I already knew something about how translation works, in a general sense, and I'd done a literary undergrad degree: my main interest was in literature. I didn't overly aspire to work for a translation agency or mostly on business texts; they’re not "lower" but I personally find them less interesting to read. Cookbooks are very useful for baking, which I love, but they are not texts I delve into and discover as language (usually - I admit there could be exceptions). So while I wouldn't mind translating one, I wouldn't spend a year studying in order to do so. Having studied languages and literature, I felt that literary was the field in which I wanted to develop my skills, and where there was a lot of scope for developing them, especially my creative skills.
Having chosen this specialism, and despite knowing that literary translation is tiny out there in the big wide world, and there aren't many opportunities, I think it's nevertheless quite normal to go into the programme expecting that it will develop you into something that could be called a Literary Translator. We expect to be able to use the skills we have at the end of it, and hope that by that, or by combining with *a little* of other fields of work, we will able to make a living, just as someone specialising in legal translation might (perhaps with a bit of editing or teaching on the side). We are regularly told, when considering careers as translators, that (literary or other) translators' skills are popular in publishing jobs, editing, advertising, marketing. We aren't told there's nowhere for us to go.
So yes, we come into the MA because we expect it to develop skills we can use, not only in idle moments on holiday when we pick up a poetry book, but as a significant part of our career.

Annie said...

It might sometimes come across as arrogance or naivety, but I believe in most cases it's simply that the decision to spend a year of our life (and a substantial amount of money) studying a particular translation field in-depth is usually not ONLY for interest's sake but also because we believe it could lead us into a fulfilling career. And that's why we feel a little deflated when we are told that it's impossible to be a Literary Translator, that one can only be a Translator who likes literary jobs, and even then, life's hard. When we are told that all the literary translators currently receiving jobs from the publishing houses are well-established and there aren't any openings for new people because not enough books are published each year in translation (this is worst if we translate into English), and when we are told that hardly anyone out there even understands what literary translation is (which incidentally is in my experience true in the UK, but not over here in the Czech Republic, where it is a well known and respected profession, albeit still rather a niche one).

Annie said...

Don't get me wrong, BJ's arrival and her frankness and advice about the real world of professional translation was the best thing that happened to our MA programme. Of course we need to be prepared for the real world! But that's going to be a bit disappointing for as long as we'd been hopeful. And being keen and hopeful is what led most of us to want to do that MA, I think.
Peoples' reactions to that disappointment are of course different, and sadly can be unpleasant, or can lead people to give up completely as the path ahead is pictured as too thorny. But it doesn't need to. Most of us plough on, one way or another. Most of us have to submit to the present day reality of needing to make a living (and perhaps being advised to start by reading and writing as much as possible, for free, when they won't eat or pay the bills if they do that, can make the goal seem a bit unrealisable). In that, I agree with Choppa that it's sad that money has to be first in current society. But most of us will, I believe, eventually find a way to make translation a big part of our professional life, and perhaps the experience we've had will help us to make life for the next generation of literary translation hopefuls that little bit less difficult.
With regard to what Kevin said, I agree that for the few people lucky enough to have been able to develop a really in-depth knowledge of both language and another field at university, getting into specialised translation is an obvious and successful path. But I despair to think that we are losing so many good linguists to law, sales and programming while we are giving translation jobs to those who perhaps have the field-related knowledge already, but have language as a side-skill and don't have a true passion for language. What will that do to our languages and texts? And will anyone bother to study languages in future, if they realise that the jobs they'd like to have are going to be taken by people who majored in medicine or psychology or business studies?
Lastly - and apologies for going on so long - I agree wholeheartedly with BJ that more interaction between the MA programmes would be beneficial. There are three MAs I would like to see having greater interaction: Creative writing, Literary translation, and Translation and Interpreting. In my experience, there were hardly any opportunities given for the first two groups to interact, which I find rather unfortunate. But between the literary and non-literary MA translation programmes, the opportunities were regularly there, but the discussions we did begin got nearly nowhere because the two groups had such widely different understandings of the process and challenges of translation. Not because the literary group were thinking on a higher level, but because they were thinking from a different perspective, a more creative level, while the others were focused on technicalities and right v wrong choices in translation, and often couldn't see it from our perspective. I guess avoiding thinking of translation in terms of right/wrong is what made technical translation seem less exciting to me than literature; perhaps it's also what makes some literary translators seem like they look down on those who think of it that way.

B.J. Epstein said...

Thank you for all the comments, Annie. It's good to hear from you -- I hadn't realised you were in Prague now!
I think the main issue for me is wanting to be both encouraging and realistic at the same time, and then sometimes feeling hurt when students put down the kind of translation work that many of us do actually need to do if we want to, you know, eat and pay bills.

Best wishes,
BJ

B.J. Epstein said...

Kevin Hendzel (http://www.blogger.com/profile/13134174901029466746) is trying to post a comment here, but Blogger is acting up, so I will post it:

Annie, thank you for taking the time to respond with your thoughts. Perhaps I could shed more light on this in a more helpful way by addressing one of your specific comments.
__________

"We expect to be able to use the skills we have at the end of it, and hope that by that, or by combining with *a little* of other fields of work, we will able to make a living, just as someone specialising in legal translation might (perhaps with a bit of editing or teaching on the side)."
_______

I do understand that this is your hope. For better or worse, what determines success in the commercial translation market is commercial feasibility. As a commercial venture, that generally means subjects (technical, legal, business, law, etc.) where a customer has a commercial interest in the contents of the translation and is willing to pay for it.

In this sense, a very skilled legal translator with substantial experience working in a major language pair is in a far better position to be commercially successful than any translator without a similarly marketable skill set.

In the U.S., the "default" image of translation among the general public is this university-centric all-literature environment in which college professors labor in dust-filled rooms producing literary translations. This is not even remotely what the commercial translation world looks like, of course (and I've spent well over a decade in the U.S. national media attempting to correct that default image.)

Anyway, the literature sector of the translation market -- no, this hint of a sliver of a market segment -- is almost invisible against the background of ANY other single technical field. IT translation alone in the top 10 languages is easily 1,000 times bigger. One year of Japanese-to- English in pharmaceutical patents keeps more translators in the U.S. busy than all published literary translators combined over the last 10 years. Technical translation in most U.S. translation companies is measured in millions of words.

The only area of literary translation that comes even remotely close is popular literature, mostly modern fiction, translated FROM English into the top 5 other major European languages.

I think any discussion of how you expect to make a living must by definition consider the nature of the market where you hope to do so. If you were a color pencil artist in college, could you make a living today as such an artist? Sure, perhaps. But my advice to you would be to learn to do some of the same great art working in the electronic graphic arts, where the market is, the jobs are and the money is. After all, that's what "making a living" means. :)