How Language Works

My summer reading included David Crystal’s book How Language Works. It’s an easy-to-understand explanation of many aspects of language, including how we physically are able to speak and to understand language, how and when children learn languages, different writing systems, sign language, what dialects are, pidgins and creoles, and teaching languages. In short, this book is a good introduction to what language is and does.

There’s even a brief section on translation and interpretation. This section includes the following paragraph that defines what translators do and are:

“Translators aim to produce a text that is as faithful to the original as circumstances require or permit, and yet that reads as if it were written originally in the target language. They aim to be ‘invisible people’ – transferring content without drawing attention to the considerable artistic and technical skills involved in the process. The complexity of the task is apparent, but its importance is often underestimated, and its practitioners’ social status and legal rights undervalued. Some countries view translation as a menial, clerical task, and pay their translators accordingly. Others (such as the Japanese) regard it as a major intellectual discipline in its own right. The question of status is currently much debated.”

Versioning vs. Translating

Last week, I attended the conference for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in New York City. There were several panels on translation, which was exciting to see. However, it seems quite obvious that not everyone really understands what translation is.

At the first panel I attended on translation, one woman (who shall remain nameless) was introduced as "a poet and translator." However, it quickly became clear that this woman was a monolingual. She didn't know the language she was "translating" from, nor did she know much about the culture, and she had never visited the country. How, then, did she translate?

Well, she is a professor at a university. She found a professor in the psychology department who was a native speaker of the language in question; that professor wrote a literal translation of the poem, and our "translator" then rewrote it as she saw fit. In other words, she took word-for-word translations and wrote versions of them.

Versioning is indeed a form of creative writing, but it is not translation. To truly translate, one must know the language the work is written in and the culture that informs the work. There is team-translation, but this doesn't seem to fall into that category.

It was surprising and disappointing that at a major conference, there was such confusion about what translation is.

A Round-Up of Articles

Here’s a round-up of articles for the weekend.

This blog post calls translation “both the most parasitic form of writing and the purest.” It goes on to say “It’s writing without storytelling, without plot, or character, or any of the other gifts that only a few lucky fictioneers have it in them to deploy. No, translation is writing at its most elemental linguistic level, with the kit provided and only the words missing. It belongs alongside singing or acting or symphony conducting — an interpretive art, but no less an art for all that. Translation is what painting by numbers would be, if only the painter had as many colors handy as there are words in the Oxford English Dictionary.” The writer of the post also admits, “My translation work so far hews toward the irreverent, making free with a lot of colloquialism, anachronism, and general puckishness. My Spanish isn’t the greatest, either, so I probably couldn’t be slavishly faithful to the original if I tried.”

As a native Chicagoan, I enjoyed the Chicagopedia, with words/concepts specific to Chicago.

A post on another blog looks at a translation effect called “flattening”. The writer says, “There’s a kind of translation-effect that you would think would be quite easy to avoid: flattening, or choosing a word much less powerful and vivid than the original.” He adds, “These are not mistakes or mistranslations in the usual sense, since they fall within the general semantic range. You could imagine a situation where you'd want to translate gemir with grieve (you could, maybe, but I can't), or golpear with knock. But why would a translator want to consistently err on the side of weakening the effect? It's like making a photocopy of an original and having the print look obviously fainter.”

An article on new words/phrases from 2007, including bromance, crowdsource, gorno, nose bidet, and vegansexual.

The Brooklyn Rail literary magazine has a new section for translation. You might enjoy the first three works published there and you might want to submit there yourself. I thank translator and poet Rika Lesser for sending me this link.

Wicked Stepmother Tongues

I saw this interesting blog post on using “stepmother tongues”, i.e. on people who write in or translate to a language other than their native one.

I have worked on translations to Swedish with native Swedish speakers, but I doubt I would ever want to be completely responsible for any jobs to Swedish, because it is not my native language and I know there are things I would miss or be unable to translate as well as I could when working to English. I turn down such assignments when asked to take them on, explaining why. Likewise, I regularly write articles and essays in Swedish, but I would probably not want to write fiction in any language other than English. You just have a different feel for your mother tongue than you do for your stepmother tongues.

Some rare people are true bilinguals and can write in or translate to more than one language equally well. And some people do eventually feel comfortable and confident working in a language other than their native one. The post mentions Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera as examples; Vladimir Nabokov is another one, as is Elias Canetti, though he did learn German from a fairly young age.

But I confess that I am suspicious when people profess “true fluency” in a multitude of languages and take on assignments requiring them to translate both to and from their native language. Many people do have stepmother tongues, but sometimes those stepmothers can be wicked and can make us think we are better at them than we actually are.

A Polychromatic World, or Against Ethnocide

Those who know me are well aware that anthropology is one of my big interests. My choice of a career in translation makes sense in the context of this deep enthusiasm for cultures and languages; translation can be considered a form of anthropology. As I’ve said before, translation does not simply involve finding an equivalent word in the target language for a word in the source language; rather, it is about conveying the whole culture that has helped shape each word, each phrase, each concept in a text. That’s why it isn’t enough to study a bilingual dictionary or a list of vocabulary in order to consider oneself fluent in a tongue; a deep understanding of the culture and the people is necessary.

Wade Davis is an anthropologist and National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence (an oxymoronic title, as he points out!). Someone sent me this link to a speech Dr. Davis gave a few years ago. In it, he mentions that there are currently 6000 languages on our planet, but only 3000 are still used regularly and taught to children. Dr. Davis claims that every 2 weeks, an elder who is the last speaker of his or her language dies and with that elder, the language is gone. And when a language is lost, so are the beliefs, feelings, and culture behind that language. In an interview, Dr. Davis points out that “now languages, like cultures, like species, are being lost so quickly that they don’t have time to leave descendents.”

Dr. Davis says in his speech that genocide is condemned while ethnocide (which includes the loss of cultures and languages) is not; instead, it is “celebrated as part of a development strategy”. But a “polychromatic world of diversity” is to be preferred. Anthropologists, he said, believe that “story-telling can change the world” and that “this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world, where all the wisdom of all the peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.” Certainly, we translators (who are, after all, people devoted to intercultural communication and understanding, and people who help others have a voice) believe this as well.

Team Translation

This weekend, I was reading Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler. In an interesting essay by Lin Kenan on translation’s role in China, there was a section on the history of translation in the country. Translation in China began two thousand years ago with Buddhist religious texts; such translation was done in teams and it included what perhaps can be considered a form of sight translation, the subject of the last post.

Dr. Kenan writes: “First, a foreign monk recited from the scriptures. As he was doing so, a native speaker of the target language translated orally what was heard into Chinese. Then someone else transcribed it into written script before it was polished and finalized by a stylist.”

This is quite a different method of operation than most translators follow these days, at least in Europe and the United States. It is true that many religious documents are translated in teams or at least the translation projects are run by editorial boards, but otherwise, team translation is not common, and interpretation/sight translation (I assume that the interpreters in China had access to the scriptures being recited from) usually is not part of the process. One wonders if the translations suffered or were improved because of the multitude of people working on them. Having several people to share ideas with and/or to look over a translation is generally beneficial for translators and their work, but there is also the question of style, since all people have different vocabularies and different ways of writing, so it might be difficult to make a text consistent if each of the translators on a team has his or her own translation techniques and his or her own sense of the text and its style.

Dr. Kenan mentions that team translation is still practiced regularly in China; a recent example he gives is James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sight Translation

The previous post described a translator training program I learned about during a lecture at Swansea University. There was also another interesting lecture at my school last week. Professor Gloria Sampaio from the Catholic University of São Paulo in Brazil spoke about sight translation.

Sight translation is something I had never thought much about and it is not one of the more researched areas of translation studies, so I appreciated her talk. Basically, sight translation is doing a translation on the spot orally from a written text. Sometimes a translator or interpreter might have a couple of minutes to prepare, but often she or he simply gets a text and has to read and translate it aloud at once. In other words, it is oral translation, a combination of translation and interpretation, of the visual and the vocal. Professor Sampaio said that it should sound as though the translator is just reading aloud something in the target language.

Historically, she explained, it was used a pedagogical tool for teaching classic languages. Some language courses still do use this technique. Now, it can frequently be part of an interpretation assignment, such as during a court case when there are documents being discussed, or if an interpreter is doing a simultaneous conference interpretation and someone is reading aloud from an essay (so the interpreter has the paper and also has to listen in case the speaker deviates from the text in some way). In other situations, an interpreter or translator might be handed a text and asked to summarize or analyze it, rather than perform a straight translation.

Professor Sampaio made it clear that sight translation is a challenging activity, since it requires so many different skills at once (reading comprehension, analysis, terminology, quick-thinking, memory, speech production, and so on), and that it could be a useful part of interpreter training programs. She also thought it was a good way of testing and assessing translation/interpretation/language students or applicants for language-related jobs.

Translating Milan Kundera

In the last post, I quoted from a review of I.B. Singer’s work, which makes it clear that he rewrote as he translated, thus blurring the definition of translation. In the book Translating Milan Kundera, Michelle Woods describes how Mr. Kundera does the same thing, constantly translating his work and his biography in a variety of ways.

Milan Kundera is a Franco-Czech novelist who, it can be argued, primarily has readership though translation. Ms. Woods analyses his oeuvre and the various functions of translation within it through the prism of the four kinds of translation that she sees there: translation in the traditional sense (that is, between languages and cultures), rewriting (Mr. Kundera rewrites his books, reworks his earlier writings into later ones, and redefines his bibliography), writing (all writing can be considered translation, and this is especially applicable to Mr. Kundera, since he mostly writes for a non-Czech audience), and reception (how publishers and readers both in the Czech Republic and abroad understand and receive his work). Woods compares and studies Kundera’s Czech, French, and English writings, and uses them as a case study to understand all the different ways translation is involved in authorship.

What is interesting about Mr. Kundera, as with Mr. Singer, is that he changes his books as he reviews and works on the translations (he does not translate himself, but works with and supervises his translators closely – some say too closely. The books aren’t changed so much that they become unrecognizable, but they are clearly not just ‘straight’ translations. So they are some combination of rewriting, adapting, and translating. Perhaps we could call it transwriting, writing across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Translating and Rewriting

Speaking of Yiddish, I noticed this review of a biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer in December. Interestingly, the biography itself is a translation, which is never mentioned, but the review does briefly discuss the translation of Mr. Singer’s work:

“Fame in America came to Singer shortly after, when The Partisan Review published his story “Gimpel the Fool.” Here too, though, sweetness came with bitterness. Saul Bellow had translated the work at the request of Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. “I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool,” Gimpel begins, sounding more like Augie March than someone from the old country. It’s hard not to wonder about the effect on Singer of this side door to renown. We know he never let Bellow near another story of his, doing his own translations from that time on with the help of not-so-famous assistants.

“These translations — “second originals” as Singer called them — grew to be quite different from the Yiddish texts. Singer often stripped much of the metaphysics and verbal density out of his native-language efforts, leaving a simpler mix of the imaginative and the quotidian, the carnal and the concrete, that he felt would appeal to the tastes of English-language readers. And they — especially American Jews — responded. Singer became for them an appealing combination of home-grown mystical realist and approachable modernist. In addition, he was the beneficiary of their guilt and grief over the fate of the people they had left behind in Europe.”

In other words, Mr. Singer changed his works as he ‘translated’ them, perhaps just to make small adjustments or improvements at times, and for other works, changing them for the target audience. Is something still a translation if it is a new, changed version in a new language? Where is the line drawn between translating and rewriting, or translating and adapting?

This will be discussed more in the next post.

Pseudotranslations and Anti-Plagiarism

A really fascinating subject has come up in some of my recent reading: pseudotranslation. In his book Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond,

Gideon Toury defines pseudotranslations as “texts which have been presented as translation with no corresponding source texts in other languages ever having existed – hence no factual ‘transfer operations’ and translation relationships”. In other words, it is a fake translation.

But what is the point of that? Mr. Toury suggests that this is a “a convenient way of introducing novelties into a culture” and is especially useful “in cultures reluctant to deviate from sanctioned models and norms.” He also mentions that there may be times when either translation itself or else a particular type of literature has prestige, so authors try to get in on the action, as it were, by creating pretend translations. There are also occasionally political reasons behind them, and an example he gives is of a supposed Kazakh folk singer whose work conveniently existed in Russian, but never in the original language.

After reading the “excursus” on pseudotranslations in Mr. Toury’s book, I happened to read an article on looking for literary plagiarism that described a similar phenomenon, anti-plagiarism. The article said “Literary critic Terry Eagleton has written entertainingly of “anti-plagiarism,” a 19th-century literary wheeze favored by Irish critics, who pounced on poets or novelists for plagiarizing or surreptitiously translating some little-known domestic or foreign work and presenting it under their name. The trick was that the “original” work presented by the prosecuting critic was itself a forgery, written after a new work’s publication to frame an enemy.” This article then linked to Mr. Eagleton’s on literary forgery.

Although both pseudotranslations and anti-plagiarism can seem to be a kind of literary shtick, designed to get an author noticed, or even an abuse of the form, meant to accomplish a political or cultural goal, there might be times when such a style can be successful and witty.

Translating from English to English

In the last post, I mentioned that American and British English are not always the same, even if they are, obviously, mutually intelligible for the most part. Something many people don’t realize is that there are translators who translate between American and British English.

Why would such a job be necessary? After all, if you can read English and have some basic knowledge about vocabulary and grammar differences among the various Englishes, why should seeing the word “boot” (UK English) instead of “trunk” (US English) bother you? Wouldn’t you understand if a character in a novel asked, “Do you have a pen?” (US English) instead of “Have you got a pen?” (UK English). Wouldn’t it just add to the flavor (or flavour) of whatever you are reading?

Well, I believe that is generally true for literary works; after all, just as it would be odd if, in a book set in Spain, a character suddenly used American slang, I think preserving the original style and feeling of an English text is important. Publishers tend to disagree with me, however, in part because they seem to assume the audience would find it confusing or disturbing if a book was in any way “foreign.”

This is especially the case with children’s literature, because it is erroneously believed that children don’t understand that people in other countries might speak differently or have different traditions. So publishers worry that Americans kids might think it is “weird” if an English boy in a book that takes place in England says “lift” and not “elevator,” and therefore such things are translated to American English (or to British English, in the case of American books). I have not read any of the Harry Potter books, but I have been told that the vocabulary and grammar in them is Americanized for US audiences, and that some American Harry Potter aficionados insist on buying their books from the UK, so they can read the original texts. And, as another example, I received some information not long ago about a children’s book translated to English from a Scandinavian language. An editor at the British publishing company implied that major, “neutralizing” changes were made in the translation (including removing all mentions of the setting), so the book would be ready for child audiences in both the UK and the US, and so a second, American translator wouldn’t later be needed, at an additional cost to the publishers. To me, this kind of translation amounts to a sort of dumbing-down of the book, because it makes it easier for readers to access. Sure, explanation may sometimes be needed, and that can be given in a footnote or by adding a word or two to the text, but remaking parts of a novel so it appeals to foreign readers is going a bit far.

When it comes to non-fiction, though, I have more understanding for publishers. In some non-fiction works, it is essential that the message not be lost because the audience doesn’t recognize the words or the style. For example, I have seen an ad here in Wales that says “Have you sussed it?” As an American, I had no idea what that meant when I first saw it. Then I learned that “to suss” means “to check out” or “to find out” or “to understand.” If that ad were used in the US, perhaps it would be changed to “Do you get it?” and the company wouldn’t have to worry about losing potential customers because of the incomprehensibility of their message. That’s the kind of thing an English to English translator can help with.

Cultural references can add quite a bit to a novel, but might need explication in a work of non-fiction. Recently, I read Simon Winchester’s book about the OED, The Surgeon of Crowthorne. That’s the original British title, anyway. In the US, the book is called The Professor and the Madman, apparently because the American publishers thought (correctly, I suspect) that their more dramatic title would appeal more to Americans. Knowing that fact made me wonder what else beyond the spelling and grammar had been adapted or translated for American readers. I have not read the American version, but I would imagine that the mentions of the Civil War are not necessarily as detailed in the American book, since Americans are presumably more familiar with the facts of the war, and that there might be more information about the locations in the UK, so American readers can understand distances and issues of, say, fashionability. I wondered, too, if the tone of the book, which seems rather British to me, might have been changed a bit.

In short, translators from English to English analyze texts for issues of grammar, vocabulary, and culture-specific references (locations, politics, educational systems, and so forth), and they adapt such “problem passages” to another kind of English. As I made clear above, I see the need for this in non-fiction documents, especially for ads, user’s manuals, tourist information, and other such texts that are to serve an informational purpose. But I don’t think much of it when it is applied to fiction.

Have you sussed all that?

To learn a little more about this very specific kind of translation, check out this article. It would also be interesting to know whether this type of translation is common in other languages that are spoken in two or more countries (such as German, French, Spanish, or Swedish).

Translation as Anthropology

As someone who likes to read anthropology texts for fun but who unfortunately only took one anthropology course in school (typically for me, it was a class on the anthropology of food!), I really appreciated this quote from Dr. Rajendra Singh, a linguist at the University of Montreal:

“[T]ranslation is best defined as that branch of anthropology in which the field comes to the investigator’s office.”

This is such a succinct way of describing the translator’s job and the necessity of understanding the cultures behind the languages involved in a translation. Too many people believe translation is simply a matter of finding a replacement in the target language for each word in the source language and they forget how much more is required of the translator. Let’s be anthrotranslators, researching every aspect of the languages and cultures we work with.

Attempting the Impossible

In the last post, I discussed Gregory Rabassa’s book If This Be Treason. In the summary of the book, I left out an interesting issue, because I felt it deserved a whole post – a whole series of posts even – of its own.

Is translation possible?

Sure, people translate every day and the translations are generally functional and sometimes beautiful. But translation isn’t just about making the same information available in another language; it’s about capturing all the feelings, images, ideas, and considerations behind each word and phrase, and the culture and history underlying the text. Frankly, it seems impossible to do this, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, all readers read a different book. Our individual backgrounds, experiences, interests, and beliefs lead us to interpret and understand each text in a slightly different way than all other readers. For example, imagine a dog right now. What are you seeing in your head? How big is the dog? Is it a mutt or a specific breed? What color is the dog’s fur? How old is it? How large is its tail? We all understand that the word “dog” refers to a furry, four-legged canine of some sort, but in reality, it doesn’t mean the exact same thing to any two people. Take this concept writ large and it is easy to see how each text produces different reactions and feelings and images in each reader. Five readers who read a book could be said to be reading five different books and five translators would translate a book in five different ways. If you consider a translator to be first and foremost a reader (a translator, after all, has to thoroughly read and understand the text in order to be able to translate it), then all translations are dependent on how the translator reads the original document and then on how the readers of the translation understand the translator’s re-creation of the text. So we’re already distanced quite a bit from what the author said in the source language.

The next problem is that languages (and cultures) don’t work in the same way. As with the dog example, there are words and phrases that represent one thing for people who come from a certain culture or speak a particular language, but would imply something else altogether for other groups. How many times have people discussed the fact that the Swedish word “lagom” is very difficult to translate? We can write “just right” or “enough” or something along those lines, but those insufficient English translations miss the whole culture behind the word. To be dramatic, one might even say that to not understand “lagom” is to not understand Sweden. Beyond vocabulary, it’s important to remember that grammar, word order, pronunciation, rhythm, sounds, and many other factors also influence meaning.

So if words don’t have a universal meaning even for people who speak the same language and if various languages emphasize different aspects or have different rules, translation becomes a very difficult task. We simply can’t say the same things in the same ways in all languages; instead, we often have to rephrase or change the meaning slightly.

For many non-fiction translations, it can be enough to just get close. A menu offers chicken and dumplings and salmon with a dill sauce or two parties agree in a contract to work together on a specific project or an instruction manual says to connect this piece to that one. Such translations are often more about the information being transferred than about the language itself and the feelings and images it suggests. But for literary work, the standards are higher and the challenges multiply.

There can never be a perfect translator or a perfect translation. However, as Mr. Rabassa writes, translation “may be impossible but it can at least be essayed.”

Translation as Treason

Earlier this year, I read If This Be Treason by translator Gregory Rabassa and wrote a short review of it that is forthcoming in Facköversättaren (the journal of the Swedish Association of Professional Translators).

The first part of the book is about Mr. Rabassa’s life in general, the second looks specifically at the authors and works he has translated, and the third attempts to answer the question that runs through the entire book: Is translation in fact a sort of treason?

Mr. Rabassa considers translation treason in several ways. A translator can not be truly faithful to the source text, since words do not work the same in different languages and do not have the same meanings or create the same images or feelings, so he commits treason against the individual words, and thus the language, and the culture behind the language. Mr. Rabassa writes that a “betrayal of language is many times the betrayal of words and at the same time it is a reflection of the hurdles present in communicating between cultures.”

He also mentions that there are several types of personal treason committed in translation, that against the author, since his words and meanings are not truly preserved, and against the reader, who only reads and receives the translator’s interpretation and re-creation of the original text, and even against the translator himself, since translators “sacrifice our best hunches in favor of some pedestrian norm in fear of betraying the task we were set to do.”

Mr. Rabassa suggests that one could consider all of life a translation and thus a treason, as “life is an idea, a word, in short, a metaphor for conscious existence and hence a translation. We are translating our existence and our circumstance as we go along living and before we are fatally assigned the translator’s lot once the treason has been done.”

If translation is treason, then I think it is a necessary sort of treason. Obviously, no one can read all texts in their original languages. Language often separates writers from their readers, and readers from information or enjoyment. But translators serve writers and readers by bringing them together, by bridging the language divide.

We translators can only do our best to make the treachery as small as possible.

An Interview with Brett

To continue looking at the basic questions of what translation is and who and what a translator is, I’m posting an interview with me that was published in “The Practicing Writer” in 2004. “The Practicing Writer” is a free monthly e-newsletter and website run by Erika Dreifus; it’s full of interesting and helpful information for writers.

The Translator's Practice: An Interview With Brett Jocelyn Epstein by Erika Dreifus

This month “The Practicing Writer” considers an aspect of the craft and business of writing that many of us don't necessarily think about every day: translation. What does a translator do? What are the ties between writing and translation? And where can we learn more? In an interview with Erika Dreifus, Brett Jocelyn Epstein shares insights on these essential elements of the translator's craft and business.

Erika Dreifus: Brett, can you briefly describe the job of a translator?

Brett Jocelyn Epstein: Translation is the art and craft of bringing an author's actual words, as well as his ideas, implications, moods, voice, style, and so forth, from the source language (the language to be translated from) to the target language (the language to be translated to), without being either overly literal and strict with the text or overly free and loose. A translator must consider what and how would the author have written this document if he were writing in the target language. So, translation is the delicate and formidable job of perfectly recreating the author's original document.

ED: What kinds of business opportunities are open to translators?

BJE: The great majority of translators support themselves with non-fiction work. My partner, Daniel Elander, and I mainly translate articles, websites, business documents, and menus from Swedish to English, though we've also worked with Danish. Translating legal documents, articles, reference works, textbooks, websites, and other such items unfortunately pays better and is much easier to get into than translating poetry, plays, or novels. I personally feel that translating creative work is more challenging and more interesting, but since only approximately two percent of all literature published in the United States is in translation (and the translations that do exist come primarily from Spanish, French, or German), it is clear that there is little work available for people who want to translate novels or poems. Most people who do this work don't do so because they want to make money (translating literature is far from lucrative), but rather because they are dedicated to literature and/or to the specific author or work and because they want the intellectual and creative challenge.

ED: In a recent article, you issued a call for more people to “join the ranks of translators.” In what ways may practicing writers be particularly suited to the work of translating texts?

BJE: I really do think that writers are the ideal people to be translators. To translate a text, you must understand it fully and be able to basically rewrite it in a new language. Clearly, then, it helps if a translator has experience with writing, the writing process, analyzing literature, and editing. Certainly there are good translators out there who do not work on their own original writing and likewise there are good writers who don't have the patience for or interest in working with other people's documents, but in general, I believe translating and writing are worthy and compatible mates and I find both that reading, analyzing, and translating texts has benefited my own writing and also that writing stories and articles has helped me better understand the English language and how to translate into it.

ED: What works “on translating” would you recommend for anyone interested in learning more on the topic?

BJE: One of the best ways, I think, to learn about translation is to carefully read and study a document in both its original language and its translation. When I did this with Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, I spent a lot of time trying to understand what words and phrases really meant and why the translator had made certain choices and I compared this to what I would have done, had I been the translator. In fact, I realized that I was not satisfied at all with the English translation and I hope that one day soon a publishing company will decide to issue a new version of this novel. As for actual works on translation, I have particularly enjoyed and learned from Vladimir Nabokov's essay “The Art of Translation,” William Weaver's essay “The Process of Translation” (which can be found in an interesting volume called The Craft of Translation, edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte), and Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation by Robert Wechsler.

ED: Thank you, Brett!

This interview is from the November 2004 issue of “The Practicing Writer” newsletter. Erika Dreifus is a writer, teacher, and the editor of “The Practicing Writer.” Please see http://www.practicing-writer.com/ for more information.

I hope in the future to include interviews with other translators in this blog; if you have questions you’d like to ask a translator, or if you are a translator and would like to be interviewed, let me know.

Where the Dictionary Ends

Well, starting a blog about translation leads to two obvious questions: What exactly is translation? And what does a translator do? There are no short answers here and analyzing what translation is and what a translator does or should be is precisely what I plan to look at in the course of this blog.

Basically, translation is the act of recreating a text in a different language. Etymologically speaking, it is the “carrying across” of words from one language to another. This does not mean, however, that to translate is merely to look up each word in a given text (each word, that is, in the so-called “source language”) in the dictionary and then write down its equivalent in another language (the “target language”).

To illustrate how this technique can lead a translator terribly off-course, we can look at something some of my students do. I teach English to adults and a few of them are either resistant to the idea of learning a new language or else they simply feel “too old” or too discouraged to do so. A sneaky way they attempt to get out of actually putting in effort is to use the dictionary trick. If I assign some writing for homework, these resistant students might, instead of writing directly in English, write in their native language and then use the dictionary to translate their sentences word by word into English. It’s always pretty clear when someone has done this because many of the mistakes are obvious. One student, for example, repeatedly wrote the word “sheep” instead of “get” because the same Swedish word (“får”) covers both English words and he just picked the first word he saw in the dictionary and wrote it down without thinking about whether it was correct. He wrote, “I sheep food at a restaurant.”

You might think that someone who claims to be a translator would know better than to do this, but remembering some of the funny or odd mistranslations I’ve seen leads me to believe otherwise. Besides, translation is not just about the meaning of the words. A translator must carefully consider the culture behind the original text and how that influenced the author, and why an author made the choices s/he did, and how all this can be expressed in a new language in a natural way that does not lose or change anything. As Mikhail Ivanov wrote in an article entitled “Bulgakov’s Post Horses,” translation “begins where the dictionary ends.”

This topic will be continued in the next post.