An Erotic Relationship

In today’s Writer’s Almanac, the following information was included about the prolific translator Richard Howard. I like his quote about the eroticism of translation:

It’s the birthday of the poet and translator Richard Howard, born in Cleveland, Ohio (1929), who started out as a poet and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his book Untitled Subjects (1969). His collection Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003 came out in 2004. But he’s also known for his translations — more than 150 books, most of them from the French, including The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, which won Howard a National Book Award for translation in 1984. He said, “The relationship of the translator to the writer is an erotic relationship always, and you learn something about the person that you’re working with in an almost plastic, physical way that you can almost never learn about your friends.”

What Have You Translated This Year?

I got this idea from Engimatic Mermaid, except I have chosen just five of my many translation projects.

Five Things I Have Translated This Year

1. Contracts (a surprising number of them!)
2. A short story
3. Lots of recipes and texts about food
4. An analysis of nurses and their workplace situation
5. A text on eggs and microbiology

Who else wants to play?

The Nobel Prize in Literature

So, yes, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in literature is Doris Lessing. I heard the news one minute after it was announced, but unfortunately couldn't post until now.

I have read some work by her, but it was some time back and I can't say it was my favorite. However, I stopped by the university library today and picked up one of her novels, so I will try again.

As usual, I am sure this announcement will spark a flurry of translations!

What do you think?

Nobel Prize in Literature

This year's Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday. For some years, both the Syrian poet Adonis and the American novelist Philip Roth have been mentioned as possible winners, and that's true of this year as well. Other possible winners are Joyce Carol Oates, Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, Claudio Magris, Les Murray, Tomas Tranströmer, Ian McEwan, and Amos Oz.

The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet has a list of potential winners and the current odds on each of them.

Who do you think deserves the prize? And who do you think will win?

Learning Portuguese

Last year I took a Welsh course and while I enjoyed that (though, frankly, I mostly learned how to talk about rugby matches and order beer in Welsh), I thought I’d try a different language this year. Hence, I’m taking an introductory Portuguese course (and not just because some of my articles have been translated to Portuguese!).

So here are some online resources for those of you who might also want to learn Portuguese or improve your skills in the language:

BBC Talk Portuguese

Learning Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese

Boa sorte!

John Dryden Translation Competition

Readers of this blog may be interested to learn about the following competition:

The John Dryden Translation Competition

This is an annual competition, run by the British Comparative Literature Association, and sponsored by the British Centre for Literary Translation.

You can enter a prose, poetry or drama text translated from any language into English, but it must not be longer than 25 pages. An entry to the competition consists of the original text, your translation, and an entry form. The latter (with the full competition rules) is available on the competition website at http://www.bcla.org or can be obtained by post from the organiser, Dr Jean Boase-Beier, School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ.

Entries cost £7 for one, £12 for 2 or £16 for 3. There are prizes of £350 (First Prize), £200 (Second Prize) and £100 (Third Prize), and entries may receive commendations. The competition judges are Peter France, Stuart Gillespie, Amanda Hopkinson, Elinor Shaffer and Glyn Pursglove, and they are assisted by a large number of specialist readers.

The closing date for the competition is in February each year; reading then takes place during the spring and the judges usually meet in June to make their decision. Announcements are made straight after the judges’ meeting, and there is a prize-giving event every year in the summer or autumn, to which winners are invited.

Entries received after the closing date will go forward to the following year’s competition, so it is possible to enter at any time of the year, using the form for the current year.

Brave New Words on LiveJournal

Now it is possible to get Brave New Words on LiveJournal, all thanks to Sarah Alys Lindholm, who has been a guest blogger on Brave New Words.

Finding Sources

Translators are language experts. Ideally, we’d also be experts in all the topics that the documents we translate are about, but that’s not always possible. Of course, we tend to be good researchers and many of us are curious and enjoy learning new things. But sometimes, there is a word or a concept in a text that we just can’t figure out, or there’s a description or a phrase that we just can’t picture, and therefore, we need help from other people. On occasion, we can ask our fellow translators, but there are situations when we might need to talk to, for instance, an accountant, an architect, a chef, or a person who grew up in another country.

Last month when I was in Sweden, I spent a couple of days in lovely Karlskrona with a friend of mine, who translates to Swedish. We discussed the memoir she was currently translating and some of the challenges it posed. For example, the book takes place in Australia, and some of the plants discussed don’t exist in Sweden, much less have Swedish words. So what did the translator do? She called a botanical garden and asked for advice about one plant in particular. Together with a scientist, based on names for similar plants, she helped created a new Swedish word. Another problem was a description the author used; it seemed to reference geology and evolution, but in a slightly unusual way. My friend asked me and some other native English speakers to read the sentence and to give our impressions and to tell her how the description sounded to us. Then she happened to hear a radio program featuring an earth scientist at a university in Göteborg; she took the chance to email him and ask for advice on what this phrase meant and how it could be translated, and he did in fact reply with information.

I was impressed by how she managed to find answers to these questions, how she was willing to request help from others. So often I struggle alone or, once in a great while, ask other translators or Swedish-speakers when I get really stuck. But this is how she regularly solves such problems; she told me that knowing people in different professions and from different cultures is a great way of getting help, and as long as you are polite, there is no reason why you can’t ask for suggestions even from people you don’t know. She said that when translating a South African novel with a lot of slang and cultural and political issues, she called a local university to ask if they had any South African exchange students. They did and she invited them over for tea and they helped her work through some of her queries.

So I thought of her last week when I was working on a cookbook and was stuck on one word that kept appearing in recipes. It referred to a specific kitchen tool that does not exist in English (and, frankly, is one of those tools that don’t need to exist either): a “potatissticka,” or a “potato stick,” which you use to check if the potatoes you are boiling are ready. I always use a fork myself, but I thought I should make sure that there really was no such item.

First, I asked some people I know who like to cook; no one had anything like it. Then, I was in the suburb of Swansea called Mumbles, where I take a ceramics course. I was early for the class and was just strolling around the cute streets when I noticed a store that sold only – you guessed it – kitchen tools and cookbooks. I said to the woman behind the counter, “I’m sure this sounds a little odd, but I’m a translator working on a cookbook and I wonder if you can help me with something.”

She confirmed that there is no “potato stick” in English-speaking countries, but that people use cake testers, skewers, forks, toothpicks, or meat thermometers instead.

So the point is that not only is it interesting in and of itself to know people in different fields and with different backgrounds and interests, but it is also helpful for your translation work (or your writing or editing work, for that matter). And don’t be afraid to talk to people or to ask for their assistance; many are genuinely glad to share their knowledge.

St. Hieronymus Day

And for the third holiday this week, today is St. Hieronymus Day, in honor of Jerome (or Hieronymus), considered the patron saint of translators. Jerome translated the Bible to Latin from Greek and Hebrew, in a version that is known as the Vulgate. He studied Hebrew in order to translate the Old Testament from it, although most people at that time used the Greek Septuagint. Jerome also wrote commentaries on the Bible, sometimes explaining his translatorial choices.

So today is the day to celebrate and appreciate translators! Happy St. Hieronymus Day!

Translator Wins a MacArthur

I learned from the Stingy Kids blog that translator, poet, and publisher Peter Cole was awarded a MacArthur grant. He has translated from Hebrew and Arabic. The MacArthur website says:

"[Cole's] Ibis Editions publishes little-known works translated from Arabic, Hebrew, German, French, and Ladino, enlightening English-speaking audiences to the thriving literary tradition of the Levant. By fostering literary dialogue in and about the Middle East, Ibis provides an occasion for intellectual and cultural collaboration. In a region mired in conflict, Cole’s dedication to the literature of the Levant offers a unique and inspiring vision of the cultural, religious, and linguistic interactions that were and are possible among the peoples of the Middle East."

European Day of Languages

Today is another language-related holiday, the European Day of Languages. The way I’m celebrating is by deciding which new language I’d like to study this year. I don’t think I’m necessarily all that great at learning other languages, but I have found that even knowing bits and pieces of a language can be fascinating and beneficial.

A press release on the European Centre for Modern Languages’ website says: "Language and language learning are essential to the promotion of the Council of Europe values of democracy and human rights,” said Terry Davis, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe. “Language skills help people to understand and respect each other, as well as talk and listen to each other”, he added. “That is why the European Day of Languages on 26 September is so important.”

I encourage everyone to spend some time in the next year studying a new language.

National Punctuation Day

Too many of us who work as translators, writers, and/or editors do not always properly appreciate (or correctly use) punctuation. Since today is National National Punctuation Day (in the U.S., and it's a holiday I think should spread around the world), let's get out our copies of the Chicago Manual of Style and also review this very helpful list of resources.

Happy Punctuation Day!

No Smashed Balls: Food Mistranslations

An article I wrote awhile back based on bad translations of dishes on menus and cookbooks has now been published in Verbatim magazine. I'm posting it here, too, so you can enjoy a little humor over the weekend.

Thanks, But I Think I’ll Pass on the Smashed Balls
by Brett Jocelyn Epstein

It all started with a rabbit on whipped cream.

I was in Prague when I found that odd-sounding dish on a menu. No, thanks, I thought, imagining Thumper splashing a cloud of whipped cream around the room. Before long I was tempted by an oven-baked joint – really, what’s the point of baking your marijuana? – and some well-hung meat – no comment necessary. Soon I realized the importance of a well-translated and carefully-edited menu, especially for restaurants eager to attract an international, professional audience.

Some mistranslations and misspellings are not only puzzling, they can also be rather revolting. For example, I was not really enticed by pee soup, cock terrine, roach terrine, or bowels in sauce, and I was somewhat frightened by the violent-sounding skewer on blackened loin and the fried potatoes stuffed with flesh. Tender lamp was not illuminating and, as much as I like Sweden, eating pink-roasted Swedes is not too appetizing.

As I have a major interest for food that includes writing occasional articles about restaurants in Scandinavia and working on cookbooks, I decided something had to be done about this. Sometimes while eating at a restaurant, I would helpfully mention that the English translation of menu items such as cheese with accomplishments – how proud they must be of their cheese! – or duck with dry fruits and jewels – aren’t jewels a bit tough to chew? – might be just a little off. At some restaurants, I was rewarded with glasses of wine; other places didn’t seem too interested to know that offering plates piled high with rags of suckling pig might not draw in the crowds. Later, instead of helping for free, out of the generosity of my good-food-loving-heart, I incorporated food translations into my translation business. Of course, any translator is proud of a translation well done, but at the same time, I can’t help but think of all the restaurant patrons who will be robbed of the enjoyment that comes with wondering what exactly has annoyed that fed-up chicken, why the petrified trout is so scared, and if there is in fact anything in the bowl of grilled fatless lard.

Goose liver in veal farce indeed.

Flowers and Translation

I always think that quotes about translation and metaphors for translation are interesting. The following one from A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley is pretty well known.

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

Of course, seeds from one part of the world can be planted and successfully nurtured in other parts.

Impoverishment: When Languages Die

During my month-long summer “break” – in which I traveled to the U.S., visited friends and relatives, worked on my research, did translation and editing – I read around 30 books, and When Languages Die by K. David Harrison was definitely one of my favorites. Before the summer, I said I wanted to get a hold of this book, and I am so glad I did.

Dr. Harrison is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and researches some of the world’s endangered languages, and he also co-founded the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. In his fascinating book, which discusses, among other languages, Yakut, !Xoon, O’oodham, Vilela, Nggela, and Itza Mayan, Dr. Harrison writes that in 2001, 6912 languages were spoken in the world, but just one hundred years later, half will likely be gone. “The top 10 biggest languages have hundreds of millions of speakers each, accounting for just over 50 percent of humans...The smallest half of the world’s languages–consisting of more than 3,500 languages–are spoken by a mere 0.2 percent of the global population.” So why should we care about that?

When a language dies, a unique knowledge system is lost, as is a distinct culture, and also grammar patterns, which show how people think and process information. All of this is not only interesting in and of itself, but it is also useful and important information that helps us understand the world and what it means to be a human in it. Dr. Harrison explicates, “We have seen at least three compelling reasons to safeguard and document vanishing languages. First is the fact that our human knowledge base is rapidly eroding. Most of what humans have learned over the millennia about how to thrive on this planet is encapsulated in threatened languages. If we let them slip away, we may compromise our very ability to survive as our ballooning human population strains earth’s ecosystems. A second reason is our rich patrimony of human cultural heritage, including myth and belief systems, wisdom, poetry, songs, and epic tales. Allowing our own history to be erased, we condemn ourselves to a cultural amnesia that may undermine our sense of purpose and our ability to live in peace with diverse peoples. A third reason is the great puzzle of human cognition, and our ability to understand how the mind organizes and processes information. Much of the human mind is still a black box. We cannot discern its inner workings–and we can often only know its thoughts by what comes out of it in the form of speech. Obscure languages hold at least some of the keys to unlocking the mind. For all these reasons, and with the possibility of dire consequences for failures, documenting endangered languages while they may still be heard, and revitalizing tongues that still may be viable, must be viewed as the greatest conservation challenge of our generation.”

Dr. Harrison goes on to give examples of what is unique and interesting about various languages, and what knowledge can be lost when the languages die. For example, some reindeer-herding peoples, such as the Saami in Scandinavia or the Tofa in Siberia, have detailed taxonomies for reindeer. “Döngür” is a Tofa word “male domesticated reindeer in its third year and first mating season, but not ready for mating”, but now that most Tofa people speak Russian, they have to use a long phrase, like the English translation above, to describe what previously only took one word, and that must both be more time-consuming as well as eventually lead to diminished reindeer knowledge.

A similar taxonomy-based example is from the Ifugao language, which “has an intricate vocabulary of rice technology. Their language has 27 different names for pottery vessels for storing rice wine, 30 names for types of woven baskets used to carry foods, and 130 phrases describing in detail payments made for the use of rice pond fields. It has many expressive words like “tiwātiw,” a verb meaning to frighten animals, birds or chickens away from drying rice.” Clearly, each language offers information or ideas that is helpful to its culture.

Another aspect of knowledge loss that Dr. Harrison discusses is different kinds of time-keeping. He says that more languages have no notion of the concept of a week. Instead of the system we take for granted, other cultures have ecological, lunar, or arbitrary time systems, or combinations thereof. “Natural calendar lore served as a bond firmly connecting humankind to the natural world; this bond weakens when languages die.”

Some people think that it doesn’t matter if we lose such knowledge as a word for a three-year-old male reindeer or the Tuvan word “chyzyr-chyzyr,” which Dr. Harrison defines as “the sound of the tree tops moving, swaying, cracking, or snapping as a result of bears marking trees by clawing at them and by scratching their backs up against them.” Some people say that since these kinds of words are so situational, so environment-based, cultures must not need them anymore if they are no longer using them. In other words, people find a way of saying what they want and need to say, even if they have to use a long way around, like the Tofa people now speaking Russian. But even if you believe that, it isn’t just specific words like this that disappear; cultures, ideas, information, and “unique philosophical viewpoint[s]” vanish, too.

Dr. Harrison writes, “As languages fall out of use into forgetfulness, entire genres of oral tradition–stories, songs, and epics–rapidly approach extinction. Only a small fraction have ever been recorded or set down in books. And the tales captured in books, when no longer spoken, will exist as mere shadows of a once vibrant tradition. We stand to lose volumes: entire worldviews, religious beliefs, creation myths, observations about life, technologies for how to domesticate animals and cultivate plans, histories of migration and settlement, and collective wisdom. And we will lose insight into how humans fine-tune memory to preserve and transmit epic tales.”

And studying small, endangered languages and not just the big ones teaches us about how humans think. “Imagine a zoologist describing mammals by looking only at the top hundred most common ones. It would be easier to examine dogs and cats and cows and rabbits, all of which are composed of the same building blocks as other mammals. But if we did, we would never know that a mammal could swim (whales), fly (bats), lay eggs (echidna), use tools (sea otters and orangutans), or have an inflatable balloon growing from its head (male hooded seal). Ignorance of unusual mammals would impoverish our notion of what mammals could be. It is precisely the weird and wonderful exceptions that afford us a full view of the possibilities.”

Dr. Harrison frequently uses the word “impoverish” in his book, and it perfectly captures what happens when languages die.

Visibly and Expertly Done: Criticizing Criticism

During one of my many plane trips this summer, I was catching up on reading. In an issue of The New Yorker from July, I noticed that a review of a translated novel (Christian Jungersen's The Exception) described the book as "invisibly and expertly translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson". What exactly did the reviewer, Jeffrey Frank, mean by this? Was the translation expertly done because it was invisible? Would he have criticized the translation if he had felt it was in some way visible? Did he mean that the translation was both invisible and expert? Mr. Frank, I have learned, is fluent in Danish and has recently translated, together with his wife, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish, so obviously he can compare the source and target texts and also is familiar with the work of translators, all of which makes me wonder if he would like his own translations reviewed as "invisible." What does that term mean to him and to other reviewers of translations?

As I have posted before, critiquing a translation means much more than simply reading it as a text written in the target language and seeing whether you can tell that it was translated, and I wish reviewers, especially at such major magazines as The New Yorker, would start to understand that. I would be curious to know why the idea of "invisibility" persists.

Thinking of 'You'

During the past couple of days, I was reading a novel by a Swedish author whose work I think should be in English. As I was reading it, I thought about some aspects of the book that would make it challenging to translate. One of the primary things I noticed was that the book was written in second person -- sometimes in second person singular and sometimes in second person plural. English has only one word for both of these ('you'), but Swedish has two words ('du' for the singular and 'ni' for the plural), so in Swedish it was very clear when the narrator was referring to one person and when two or more people were being referred to. It would sound awkward to always write in English 'you two' or 'you all' or something along those lines, but how else could a translator portray the difference between 'du' and 'ni'? Obviously, just using the word 'you' for both singular and plural would ignore certain nuances of the Swedish text.

Similarly, Swedish, like some other languages, uses the second person plural as a polite form of singular 'you' (other languages use the third person as a polite form, and still others, of course, have an entire system of polite language). English does not show politeness through the choice of person, so what is the best way for a translator to capture the sense of politeness imbedded in word choice? Sometimes titles can work, but not in all situations.

So how do translators solve a problem like 'you'?

IRSCL Conference and Galician Translation

I’ve just arrived in Sweden after being in Japan for the conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. I loved Japan and really enjoyed the conference, which focused on different issues of power and children's literature. I learned about organizations related to children's lit and to educating children about literature, and also about awards for children's books, and I attended sessions on a variety of other topics, ranging from post-World War 2 literature in Asia to historical novels in Denmark, from anthologies by and/or about queer youth to wordless picture books, from anime to libraries, from books about transracial adoption to nonsense, and much more.

There were several presentations besides my own that looked at translation. I chaired one session that was about translation and national identities. The speakers were from Spain and they talked about translations from Spanish or English to the minority languages of Galician, Catalan, and Basque. One of the speakers focused on translations to Galician and she found that many translators added in Galician idioms or information about specific Galician cultural issues to the texts they were translating, and she claimed that this was a way of building a Galician identity. This is clearly a strongly domesticating strategy and it really struck me as being one that I personally wouldn't use or promote. However, the point the speaker and her co-authors made was that since Spanish is dominant in Spain, making texts Galician in this way helps create pride in the Galician language and culture, and that this is important for children who might otherwise feel that they should only or primarily use Spanish. Apparently, schools in Galicia now require children to have half of their subjects in Galician, so perhaps in a generation or two, the use of Galician will be more common, and children will gain the belief that Galician is a worthy identity, so translators won't feel the need to use this strategy anymore.

Postcolonial Theories of Translation

I’m off to Japan now to attend the conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, where I’ll present on the role of power in translating dialects in children’s literature. My research on this topic has been influenced by postcolonial theories of translation, and it’s been fascinating to see how postcolonial theories relate to children’s literature and to translation in general.

For those of you who might want to learn more about this topic, I recommend these books: Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, and Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained by Douglas Robinson. They give detailed background to the topic.

A quote from the first book sums up the role of translation in colonization: Translations are “one of the primary literary tools that larger social institutions–educational systems, arts councils, publishing firms, and even governments–had at their disposal to “manipulate” a given society in order to “construct” the kind of “culture” desired” (Tymoczko and Gentzler, xiii).

In other words, those in power can decide which texts to translate and how to translate them in order to further their own goals and influence those over whom they have power. What I will talk about in Kyoto refers to how adults might use this power when it comes to writing and translating for children.

Nordic Translation Conference, Redux

Awhile back, I posted the first call for papers for the Nordic Translation Conference. I've received a great selection of abstracts now, and I'm excited about how the conference is shaping up. Below is the second call for papers. One thing I've added to it is that people can now send in proposals for workshops they'd like to run as well; there's been some interest in having workshops/training sessions, and so far several people have offered to organize a few, and I hope there will be even more such offers. Another thing I'd like to mention about the call for papers is that I really encourage more inter-Nordic paper proposals, and not just Nordic-English ones.

And for those of you who might like to attend the conference, Scandinavian Airlines has agreed to be the official airlines of the event, which means that everyone who flies to London on SAS or one of their partner airlines will get discounted airfare.

For updated information on the conference, regularly check this website.

Second Call for Papers

The Nordic Translation Conference will take place in London at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies on 7 and 8 March, 2008.

For the first time, a major conference is being planned all about Nordic translation. While many conferences on translation frequently include a presentation or two that mention Nordic issues, however peripherally, there has not yet been an event solely dedicated to the particular challenges and pleasures of translating between and among the Nordic countries, which are often closely related culturally, if not always linguistically. It should be exciting for academics and translators working on and with the Nordic languages to gather, discuss, and exchange ideas. The speakers will include Douglas Robinson, Kirsten Malmkjær, Tiina Nunnally, Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown, Janet Garton, and Martin Næs.

The conference will look at literary and non-literary translation of all kinds, including interpreting and subtitling, both between various Nordic languages and also between English and the Nordic languages. Nordic here includes Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, any of the Sámi dialects, and Swedish. Topics can include, but are not limited to, specific linguistic issues involved in translation/interpretation between two or more languages, analysis of particular texts/genres, professional issues, translating texts by or about minority groups, the translator/interpreter’s role, and the effect of cultural similarities/differences among Nordic countries. Both academics and practicing translators are encouraged to attend and present at the conference.

In addition, the conference will include several workshops on relevant topics, such as working with specific languages or kinds of texts, using computer tools, finding reference materials, and so on. Those interested in running workshops are also invited to submit proposals.

Please send proposals for conference papers or workshops (250-400 words) and a brief biographical note by 15 October 2007 to B.J. Epstein by e-mail or to her c/o French Department, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales, or by fax to +44 1792 295978. Conference details are available at http://www.awaywithwords.se/. For ease of communication, English should be the primary conference language.

A Round-Up of Articles

A couple of months ago, I posted a round-up of articles because I kept seeing so many interesting ones on translation. Well, here’s another one, mostly focusing on translating poetry. It’s exciting that translation is appearing more and more!

Here is an entire issue of an online magazine devoted to translation. I like the quote in the piece by Linh Dinh that says “The best way to criticize an imperfect translator is to do a better translation.” I wonder how many translations have been done for that reason. There is also a nice metaphor for the work a translator does: “I’m not a translator so much as a tightrope walker between two unreliable
dictionaries.”

An article on translating poet César Vallejo is here. Poet Clayton Eshleman writes, among other things, about how translating Vallejo has influenced his own work.

And one on translating poet Zbigniew Herbert is here. This essay contains the line “Hofmann can’t read Polish (neither can I), but he makes a vigorous, smart and hugely entertaining case by comparing the older and newer translations.” I find this to be odd; if one compares two or more different translations of the same work without also analyzing the source text, then one is comparing how the texts work in the target languages, not how the target texts are as translations. In my opinion, this is not how one should critique a translation.

Finally, for those who can read Swedish, here is an article by the Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, about being translated. She writes that she doesn’t consider herself a Danish poet, but rather a poet who happens to write in Danish, since she was born and raised in Denmark. Since poetry is a way of understanding, a way of reaching other people, translation is an important part of it. She says that like Doctors Without Borders, there should be Poets and Translators Without Borders, too.

Enjoy the reading!

Translator Watson Kirkconnell

Here is an essay on an interesting, and sadly forgotten, translator, Watson Kirkconnell. Among other things, he published European Elegies, which had 100 poems from 50 languages! He was inspired to take on this task after the death of his wife.

About translation, Mr. Kirkconnell said “The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive.” He also thought that in order for a translation to be successful, the translator had to be filled with emotion.

Noble Translation

Some of you may be familiar with the Earl of Roscommon’s poem on translation. Wentworth Dillon (1633-85) was the fourth Earl of Roscommon and he was a poet and translator. Here is his poem:

‘Tis True, Composing is the nobler Part,
But good Translation is no Easie Art,
For the materials have long since been found,
Yet both your Fancy and your Hands are bound,
And by improving what was writ before,
Invention labours less, but Judgement more.

Each poet with a different talent writes,
One praises, one instructions, another bites.
Horace did ne’er aspire to Epick Bays,
Nor lofty Maro stoop to Lyrick Lays.
Examine how your Humour is inclin’d,
And which the Ruling Passion of your Mind;

Then seek a Poet who your ways does bend,
And choose an Author as you choose a Friend;
United by this sympathetick Bond,
Your grow familiar, intimate and fond.
Your Thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,
Nor longer his Interpreter, but He.

As with many other translation theorists and critics, he thinks writing is the more original and noble art, which implies that translation is reductive. However, the Earl differs from other critics in that he does seem to believe in the need for the translator to have a certain bond with his or her author in order to do the best job possible, which implies that he recognizes and respects the translator’s role in making a successful translation and the limitations the translator faces. Still, both translation and writing are “no Easie” arts and they are both noble.

Making Sales

The last post looked at marketing. On the same day I attended Keith MacGregor’s workshop, I also attended one by Helen Jones on how to sell our products/services to customers.

Ms. Jones started her workshop by saying that many people have negative perceptions of selling. They imagine that it means persuading people to buy things they don’t need or want. On the contrary, she said, selling is not coercion. It is communicating, explaining to people who you are and what you can offer them.

She described Cialdini’s six principles of influence, which relate to the process of selling products/services. The six principles are: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Yes, some of these techniques might sound a little sneaky, but I am just passing on what I learned, not necessarily recommending everything described here.

Reciprocation means that if someone does something for you, you then owe them a favor. For sales, there are two major techniques: give something to your potential client first, or else create rejection first (by beginning to say something, for example, then cutting yourself off, and saying “No, never mind. You probably won’t be interested.”). In either case, the client might then feel duty-bound to listen to your sales pitch.

Having commitment and consistency means that you follow through on what you say and also that you have a consistent (typically professional, reliable, and trustworthy) image. This relates to liking, since the image you portray and your personality help clients like you.

Social proof refers to other people recommending you and believing in you and your products. There is a difference between when a salesperson describes a product and when a friend does so; you are more likely to believe your friend, colleague, or relative, who presumably has nothing to gain by making a recommendation, than you are to believe a salesperson, who clearly has to push a certain product in order to make a living. This is why some brochures or websites list quotes from satisfied customers.

Showing your authority is a beneficial way of getting customers to realize that you have the experience and knowledge necessary. Therefore, do not be shy about mentioning your degrees, what training you have, your memberships, and so on. All this is proof of your qualification to do the job well.

The last principle, scarcity, doesn’t relate to our field so much, but it means that if people believe a product is scarce, rare, or in a limited edition, they tend to be more willing to buy it quickly and to pay higher prices.

Ms. Jones then discussed the six steps to a sale: preparation and planning, identifying potential customers, deciding on the marketing strategy, selling the product/service and closing the sale, delivering the product/service, and collecting payment.

The first three steps are related to what was described in the mentioned in the previous post. You need to know what it is you are selling and why it is different from that offered by your competitors, then you need to find your customers, and offer them this information. Here, you can use the specific features of your product/service that you came up with for your marketing plan, but Ms. Jones said that it isn’t enough to just name the features; rather, you need to also say what the benefit is to the customers. For example, if you have lived in five countries and can speak seven languages, that means you have more cross-cultural knowledge and can therefore help your clients create documents that truly work in the target culture.

After you have marketed your product/service, you need to sell it. Whether you are out on a sales call or having discussions with a client in your office/over the phone/by e-mail, the steps are the same. You need to be prepared to introduce yourself and your product/service in detail and you should find out what the client’s exact needs are. Explain how you can fill that need and describe your features and benefits.

Your client may have objections; Ms. Jones felt that price is often mentioned, but it is usually a red herring. If a client says the price is too high, you can ask, “If I give you a 5% discount, would you then be happy to buy?” However, she warned that you shouldn’t be too quick to give discounts, or if you do, you should make it clear that the customer will lose something by taking the discount, such as “I can give you a 10% discount, but then there will be no free delivery and you will not get access to the helpline.”, and/or you can say that the discount is only a first-time offer. Ms. Jones said that if you are willing to quickly discount, clients will get suspicious and think that your prices must be quite inflated. She also said that asking questions about the objections is useful. For example, if you have said “If I give you a 5% discount, would you then be happy to buy?” and the client then admits that she or he thinks the quality might not be high enough, you can say, “What concerns you about the quality?” Then you can give explanations, such as about the materials you use or the warranties you include.

After you have dealt with any objections or concerns the client may have had, it is time to close the sale. Confirm all the terms – what you will deliver and when, how much it will cost, when the client will pay – so that you both know what is being agreed upon, and also to remind yourself, so you don’t later have to call up the client and ask embarrassing questions, the answers to which you should have known. Next, thank the client and leave and/or end the meeting. Ms. Jones said many people, especially new businesspeople, get scared at this point and they keep talking, giving the client a chance to back out of the deal or to get buyer’s remorse. So she recommended that as soon you have completed the agreement, politely finish the discussion.

But you aren’t finished yet. Now you have to deliver the product/service. If you are unable to fulfill the contract for any reason, do not wait until the last minute to tell the client. Tell him or her as soon as you know that your supplier has not come through or that you have a problem with your computer, and offer to find someone else or to help in some other way. If you handle this professionally, the customer may return to you another time; if not, she or he might even discuss you negatively with colleagues, making you lose even more potential future business.

Finally, you need to collect the payment. As Ms. Jones said, “A sale is not complete until you collect payment. Not when they say ‘yes.’” You are not, as she put it, “a glorified charity” and “if they haven’t paid, your business is going nowhere.” So make sure you have agreed on the payment terms in advance and that you invoice the client immediately. If they try to take advantage – they have, after all, presumably already received the work from you, so they may try to force you into agreeing to a discount or to re-negotiate in some other way – be firm. This won’t work for most translation jobs, but Ms. Jones mentioned times when a client tried to nastily re-negotiate with her and she actually destroyed the work rather than be “pushed over a barrel.” An important note is that you should not keep delivering work or agreeing to work with this client if you do not get payment in a timely fashion. But, as Ms. Jones said, “It is easier to safeguard yourself than to mop up afterwards,” so try to make sure you know that you are working with someone you keeps his or her end of bargains and/or try to get at least part of the payment up-front.

Hopefully, this advice on marketing and selling will help your translation business!

Marketing Your Business

In June, I attended a workshop on marketing run by Keith MacGregor. Mr. MacGregor, who has a public relations firm in Cardiff, Wales, said that finance and marketing are the two most important aspects of a business, but they are also the two that people avoid or don’t really understand.

Marketing is communication. You want to communicate to potential customers what is different and valuable about your company/services; the goal of marketing is to get known and to get sales. This is a continuous process, one that you will work on as long as you offer services/products, and not something you do just once, as in a series of advertisements.

There are many different ways of marketing, though most people assume that the only way to market is buy ads in newspapers, trade publications, yellow pages, and so on. Mr. MacGregor mentioned the following kinds of marketing: advertising, public relations, direct mail, direct e-mail, having a website, leaflets/brochures, leaflet drops, launches, open days, other events, networking, radio, television, telesales, and newsletters. For translators, I’d also add that membership in associations is also a form of marketing.

With all these choices, though, how do you how best to market your own services/products? Before you get to the point of choosing how to market, Mr. MacGregor suggested that you first make a list of the six specific things that make your business different from that of your competitors. Maybe you’re cheaper, or you offer better service since you work longer hours and can answer e-mails even late in the evening, or you have lived in five countries and can speak seven languages and therefore have more knowledge and experience, etc. These reasons will form part of your message. After you have carefully thought about this, figure out who your customers are and how you can find them. The next step is to review the options for marketing and then consider what the best way/s to reach your customers would be and what you can afford.

Then you can create a detailed marketing plan. Decide what marketing activities you will do and how much they will cost, what your objectives are with this marketing (for example, to find five more customers, or to let people know about a new service you are now offering), identify your target markets, and begin the marketing, which should have consistent messages and consistent designs. Mr. MacGregor warned that that is not the end of the procedure, however. You must regularly review how the marketing is working, so you can adjust your marketing plan if necessary, and you should also follow up with potential new customers. If you sent out letters by direct mail, for example, call the people you wrote, remind them of who you are, and try to interest them in your business. You might also want to ask new customers how they heard of you, so you can track which strategies are working best for your business.

As Mr. MacGregor said, “It is one thing to have a good business. It’s another thing to convey it in a marketable way.” As translators, it’s easy to just assume that people know they need us and know how to find us. Actually, though, we need to think about why customers should choose us over other translators and how we can reach those customers.

The next post will be about the step after marketing – sales.

Birds of a Feather Translate Together

The categorization of translators in an essay entitled “Peacock, Parakeet, Partridge, “Pidgin”: An Orinthology of Translators” in Eugene Chen Euyang’s collection Borrowed Plumage is interesting. He chose different birds as ways of describing different translators and he created a “descriptive taxonomy, using popular images of birds to characterize certain practitioners of the art of translation.…it would not be difficult, if a little malicious, to find translators who might be revealingly identified with buzzards, cormorants, or dodoes.” (151)

For example, Dr. Euyang wrote, “Where the peacock preens proudly in its own glory, the parakeet borrows someone else’s glory. By mimicking the sounds precisely, it makes us almost believe that a bird is saying something human. This uncanny effect is found in a genre of translation that might be characterized as “translatophony,” i.e. rendering the phonetics of an original in one language with approximations in another language. The result is “phony,” of course, in another sense, since the semantics of the words used in the second language do not correspond to the semantics in the original, yet they constitute – by several stretches of the imagination – their own somewhat coherent meaning.” (153)

Meanwhile, the partridge (or grouse) is one who has “the tendency to complain and to grumble.” (156) Examples he offers of these kinds of translators are Edward Fitzgerald (peacock), Luis d’Antin Van Rooten (parakeet), and Vladimir Nabokov (partridge).

Finally, there’s the pidgin, which is a corrupted version of a language.

“Tellingly, each of the four avian counterparts emphasises a different sense; the peacock is clearly visual, and graphic; the parakeet is definitely aural, and phonetic; the grouse is, by instinct, olfactory: he knows when something smells; the “pidgin” is a groper and has only a clumsy tactile sense of words as objects, not as abstractions.” (158)

He closes by saying which bird he’d want to be, and says none: “I try to emulate the chameleon.”

A Job for “Professioanls” Who Don’t Mind “Loosing”

I’m on a lot of translation lists, and advertisements of translation jobs are a frequent feature of several of them. Not long ago, I saw one job that was so ridiculous that I had to mention it here.

The would-be employer was looking urgently for a highly qualified translator with at least 25 years of experience, who was a member of “professioanl associations”, and willing to translate one million words of a legal text from Arabic to English at, of course, competitive rates. The employer could not afford to pay “unrealistic American and European sky-high rates”, but noted that “whatever you might loose financially on this very BIG job, and others to come in future, you will “definetely” gain in-kind out of this mine of unprecedent legal terminology.”

Hmm, let’s see – does anyone know a single “professioanl” translator with 25 years of experience who would seriously consider a job in which they would “loose financially”, especially knowing that this job would likely lead to more work in which they would “definetely” “loose” more?

Job offers like this, which unfortunately aren’t as uncommon as you’d think, add to my feeling that we translators have to educate our customers.

On Dolphins and Wales

Since moving to Wales last September, I have learned a lot about differences between varieties of English, and I have received lots of questions about my accent. Many people have trouble placing me in part because my English has been influenced by my years in Scandinavia. So when asked (and the people here usually ask by saying “Where’s that accent from, love?”), I often reply, “Chicago by way of Sweden.”

Not too long ago, on the train from Cardiff to Swansea, I noticed a blurb (speaking of wordplay, it had the amusing heading “Dolphins sound more like Wales”) in the newspaper saying that dolphins who live off the coast of Wales have been found to have distinct accents. Cows, birds, and other animals have recently been discovered to have dialects as well. Whales, incidentally, have songs, but I haven’t heard whether dialect influences those songs.

A week after I read that, I was signing in at the reception desk in a building in Swansea while chatting with the receptionist. He asked me, “Where’re you from, love? Canada?” “No,” I replied, “I’m from Chicago, in the U.S.” He looked disappointed but then said, “Oh, that’s all right, love. We like you anyway!”

I immediately thought of the dolphins and I imagined them migrating to other areas and being asked “Where’s that accent from, love?” by dolphins speaking another dialect.

Bilingual Wordplay

In the last post, I wrote about my research into the translation of wordplay. There was one form of wordplay that I didn’t discuss and that is bilingual wordplay. First of all, what is bilingual wordplay? Well, simply put, it is when an author creates jokes through the intersection of two or more languages. There might a sentence that is partly in one language and partly in another, or there might be a phrase that can be read in two or more ways, depending on which language/s the reader believes is/are being used, or the wordplay can be bilingual in some other way.

In the collection of essays Wordplay & Translation, edited by Dirk Delabastita, there is an article by Tace Hedrick called “Spik in Glyph? Translation, Wordplay and Resistance in Chicano Poetry”. Dr. Hedrick says that bilingual puns serve “as a bridge between two separate and seemingly autonomous language systems” and such wordplay “points at the ways in which the borders of languages can become fluid when they come in contact with each other” (146).

How, then, can a translator translate bilingual wordplay? Should it be translated monolingually? If so, surely some of the flavor and feeling of the source text will disappear. So should it only be translated bilingually? If so, which language/s should be used and why?

As with other aspects of translation, the translator’s decisions when it comes to bilingual wordplay depend to some extent on the audience. Will the source audience recognize all the bilingual wordplay? Why or why not? What does the author expect or want the source audience to understand? And who will be reading the target text? What language/s would they likely be familiar with and what feelings or stereotypes are connected to those languages?

Translating Wordplay

This week, I was at the British Comparative Literature Association’s conference in London, where I presented on the translation of wordplay, using Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and two of its translations to Swedish as an example.

As with other aspects of humor, wordplay is culturally dependent; where wordplay adds an extra challenge is that it is also linguistically dependent. Wordplay is usually based on the polysemic nature of language, which means that it works at both the word level and above.

In my research, I have found a variety different methods for translating wordplay. These are:

• Deleting the wordplay (and possibly other text as well, depending on the context and the usage of the wordplay).
• Translating the wordplay on one level only, which usually means the humor disappears.
• Translating the wordplay directly, which is generally only possible if the languages/cultures are related, or if a certain bit of wordplay just happens to work in more than one language.
• Adding an explanation to the text or adding extratextual material (footnotes, introduction).
• Replacing the wordplay with another pun or another kind of humor or rhetorical device.
• Adding in new wordplay or even completely new text, in order to show readers the tone of the source text and that wordplay is used in it.

I can’t say that one solution is always the best one to choose or that another should always be avoided, or make any other broad statements. However, my general feeling was that deletion was not such a good idea since it ignores authorial intentions and the tone of the text, and I also thought that adding an explanation usually ruined the humor (if you need a joke explained to you, doesn’t that detract from the point of the joke?). In my analysis of Alice in Wonderland and those two Swedish translations, I found that a strategy that was frequently successful was creating new wordplay in place of wordplay that, for linguistic, cultural, or contextual reasons, wouldn’t work in Swedish.

Taking a Break

I’ll be taking a break from work for part of the summer (well, something of a break, anyway, since I will be attending conferences and will also still be doing editing and translation), and therefore I’ll also be taking something of a break from posting, too, though I will still post, so do check back. In the meantime, it is now easier to find past posts, since I’ve added labels throughout the blog. I’ve also added e-mail capability, which means you can get new posts automatically e-mailed to you (see the left-hand column, under Brave New Words Feeds).

Have a great summer!

Why We Should Care About Languages

Not long ago, I read a review of a new book on the loss of languages, entitled When Languages Die by K. David Harrison from Swarthmore College.

I admit that the first line of the review strikes me as ignorant: “Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century.” To me, it just seems obvious that there are many reasons why people should care, not least because, as I have said so many times before on this blog, languages all offer a different perspective on the world and that it is only beneficial to open ourselves up to more ideas and views.

A quote from the review gives evidence of the profusion of variety in human language: “local calendars, such as the lunar calendar of the Natchez, provide evidence of the diffusion of non-native plants like peaches and watermelons to the lower Mississippi, which became the names for months (along with “mulberries,” “great corn,” and “chestnuts”) by the 1750s. No one speaks Natchez anymore. Some languages with words for categories called “classifiers” demonstrate how varied the ways of parsing the world: in Nivikh, a Siberian language with 300 speakers, has 27 classifiers; in Squamish, a Pacific Northwest language with 15 speakers, you use a different number depending on if you’re counting humans or animals.”

I hope to get my hands on this book during my upcoming summer holidays!

Translation Magazine

Some of you might be interested to learn about a new magazine on translation, which is called, appropriately enough, Translation Magazine. It is produced and published by translators in Portugal, which means that all articles are in both English and Portuguese.

I just received the first issue about a week ago and it looks quite good, with a lot of interesting articles on topics such as translation myths, the challenges of being a freelance translator, translating for the automotive industry, and tips for making the translation process less labor-intensive. Full disclosure: there are also two articles in this issue of Translation Magazine that I’d previously published elsewhere and that have now been republished in English as well as translated to Portuguese.

Lucky Jim and Apostrophes

A few weeks ago, I read the humorous novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. The novel satirizes various aspects of academia and related situations, but one of the most comic parts, to my mind anyway, was when the cab Jim Dixon and Christine Callaghan are in drives up to a petrol station. Here is the sentence: “Behind these [petrol pumps] was an unlit building with a painted sign, faintly visible, reading Car’s for Hire – Batesons – Repair’s.” (page 138 in the edition printed by Victor Gollancz, London)

Why is this funny? Because of the horrible apostrophe usage! Many users of English have trouble with apostrophes, but in general, it’s pretty simple: you use an apostrophe for possessives, but not for plurals (yes, I’m leaving out contractions, and the fact that the word “its” is possessive, not plural, in order to focus on the major area of confusion). So the sign in Lucky Jim should actually read Cars for Hire – Bateson’s – Repairs.

As a copy editor, punctuation is very important to me. I have special feelings in particular for the apostrophe and the serial comma, and I’m a big fan of them both. Those of you interested in apostrophes might enjoy the Apostrophe Protection Society’s website, and those of you who don’t think you’re interested should check it out anyway. You might learn (or re-learn) a few thing’s, I mean, things.

Out Stealing Translators

Some of you may have heard by now about the novel, Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, which recently won the Independent Foreign Fiction. The award is special in part because it is quite large (£10,000), but also because the translator, in this case Anne Born, receives half of it.

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, a long review of the novel mentions the translator exactly zero times (except in the sidebar). If the reviewer has no knowledge of the original language, certainly he or she shouldn’t critique how the translation was done. But to not even state that the book is a translation or which language it was translated from (yes, the review refers to Oslo, but just because a book takes place in a certain location doesn’t mean it was written there) seems to me a gross oversight.

The reviewer, Thomas McGuane, reviews the book quite positively. How does he think that he read the book? In which language? Who and what made the English version that he so admires possible? This is truly a case of an invisible translator, and that a major book section would so blatantly ignore – dare I say “steal” – the important role of translation in making good literature from other countries available in English is depressing.

Educating the Customers, Redux: Time

In the most recent issue of the Translation Journal, I have an article entitled 'Educating the Customers, Redux: Time.' Some of you may recall my previous article on educating customers about the cost of translation.

I’ve posted the latest article below, but there are other interesting articles to read in the Translation Journal, so check it out. And let me know if you have any other ideas on how to educate customers!

Educating the Customers, Redux: Time

Brett Jocelyn Epstein

Some readers may remember my article in the October 2006 issue of the Translation Journal that discussed educating customers about what translation is and how much it costs. Well, it turns out that there’s another matter that we translators need to bring up with our customers: time.

Have you experienced the situation where you received a text from a customer and then were casually, or perhaps sheepishly, informed that it was needed back – perfectly translated and/or edited, of course – within just a few hours or days? And how often has such a text been especially long and/or complicated? And has a customer ever promised to send you a project by a certain date, not met the deadline, sent you the text days or even weeks later, and then nevertheless expected you to be done with your part of it by the date originally agreed upon? And how frequently has such an event occurred during a particularly busy period (annual reports season, for example), when your work has been carefully and tightly scheduled?

It is natural to feel, when something like this happens, that our customers do not respect us or our time, that they have no understanding of what our job entails, and that they do not care if we have to work from eight a.m. until two the next morning several days in a row just to get their assignment done on time. And thinking that a customer does not respect or show consideration for the highly trained professional he or she has entrusted with an important document can cause frustrated and angry feelings and potentially even affect the translator so much that the job is not done as well as it could have been. Sometimes, translators have even been known to warn their colleagues not to accept work from a certain client, since it is “always late.” In other words, it’s a lose-lose situation all the way around.

So why do customers do this? Why do they jeopardize the quality of the work and their relationship with the translator? In my experience, the major reasons are 1) that the customer does not know what is really involved in translation, and thus can not properly schedule the time needed for a thorough translation job, or 2) the customer him- or herself can not schedule his or her own work properly and then passes off the stress and pressure of a looming deadline to the translator, or 3) the customer assumes self-employed workers are simply sitting around, waiting desperately for the next job, and can take anything at any time. A subset of the last cause of this problem is that customers sometimes seem to assume that they are your only customer – or at least your most important one – and that even if they have not sent you the work by the time you agreed on, there is no reason to believe that you might now be busy with someone else’s assignment.

How, then, can we translators tackle this delicate matter of time? To begin with, we can offer the customers more information before they even have hired us. The easiest step is something I recommended in the last article: write detailed information on your website or in your other promotional materials about what translation is and what is involved in your work. If you can, describe past assignments in general terms (because of privacy issues, you do not want to be too specific about what the job was) and mention how long it took you to do every stage of each project. For example, you can write: “5000 word contract. Half of the text was a general description of the companies and their products, and the other half was complicated legal language. I did a good rough draft in six hours of full-time work, and then I spent forty-five minutes researching terms. I revised the translation for three hours, edited it for two, and finally spent another two and a half hours comparing the source and target texts.” Perhaps if many translators began adding to their websites a section about time, along with ones on their professional backgrounds and rates, customers would take notice. Maybe they would learn something, too.

Similarly, when you are first offered an assignment, do not write back with information about your rates only. Those who are not translators have no way of guessing how much time or effort a job could take, which is why it is very helpful if you can be as detailed as possible. Say how many hours you anticipate each step in the translation process taking. Write whether the assignment will require you to go to the library or a bookstore to get specialized information, or collaborate with another translator or other professional. If you can see a rough draft of the document or get any more information about it, look it over and let the customer know if you think there will be any significant problems that will cause you to take a longer time than usual (for example, if the text is poorly written, or if it will be sent to you as a PDF rather than a Word document). And be sure to tell the customer what your schedule is like. Customers do not need to know all about your family obligations or your medical appointments, but it is certainly appropriate to tell them if you know (or expect) that you have a big job coming in, or if you will be on vacation, or if there is anything else that will affect your working time and ability. I usually give my customers specific information, such as, “I will be out of town for the next two weeks, but I will be checking my e-mail. So you can send me the assignment and I will print it out and study it while I am away. But I will not start translating it until this date, so you can expect it on that date. If the assignment has not arrived by this date, then I will not be able to finish it by that date.”

Also, sometimes you need to be stern with a customer. If you have previously had bad experiences with a certain client or if the project in question is coming during a particularly busy season, warn the customer in advance. Say, “I am looking forward to this assignment, but I want you to know that if it does not reach me by the time we agreed upon, I will not be able to do it.” You don’t need to explain to customers what else you have going on and you should not hint to them that you will be nice and make an exception for them and accept jobs that are sent a day or two late; all you need to do is civilly give them this warning, which hopefully will spur them on to get the work to you as planned.

But the advice above only addresses what you can do before you have gotten the text to be translated. What happens if a customer sends you the document after the date you have agreed upon? Or if a customer asks you translate something in an unreasonable amount of time?

To take the second question first, you need to, as stated above, explain exactly what is involved in the work and why you need more time. If the customer still insists – and often this is because he or she was late doing his or her own part in it – you can decide if you do in fact have the time to get it done, even if it means a few extra-long days and nights for you. Naturally, however, you will not work so hard for free, and you will charge a rush fee. Standard rush fees range from an additional 50% to 100% of the cost. Whether a client is willing to pay for the rush work is another question, but that won’t be discussed in-depth here, since the issue of money was addressed in the previous article. I can just briefly remind you that your time is valuable and that you should not suffer, and be paid poorly to boot, when a customer has not planned the project well. You can also ask for a late fee in some situations.

If you see that a document has not come to your e-mail in-box by the date you had expected it, it is appropriate for you to write to the customer and ask what is happening. It may be that the text is finished and ready to be translated, but somehow it just was not sent to you. It could also be that the customer found another translator or the job was postponed and you were not notified. I usually write something like, “I am just checking in with you about the translation assignment. I would appreciate it if you can let me know the status of the project.” It is also appropriate to add a reminder about your time limits or scheduling conflicts, as applicable.

As for what to do when the job has finally arrived, this depends on your relationship to the customer, the size of the assignment, and how late the assignment is. If it is a client who has never been late before and/or someone from whom you earn much of your income, you might want to gently mention the lateness, but not get into a big discussion about it. If the text is short or easy enough that you can still get a translation done, you can let the tardiness go. This time, anyway.

Sometimes, however, you may have to turn down an assignment to get the point across (if it does not cause financial hardship for you to do so, of course). Yes, you may have originally accepted the job, but if the customer has not kept his or her side of the agreement and has not sent you the work as promised, tell the client that. It is enough to politely say, “I am sorry, but I carefully schedule my time and as you did not send me the document as agreed upon, I can no longer accept the job. I hope you find someone else.” In most other circumstances, I recommend finding a colleague when you can not do a certain assignment, but in the case of delay on the customer’s part, it defeats the purpose if you do so. The customer will then just assume that he or she need not be on time, since there’s always another available translator, should the first one be too busy. If you are feeling particularly feisty, you could even mention that you had to turn down other jobs in order to make yourself free for the one that did not appear, and that as a result, you have lost money and potential future clients. Unfortunately, some people just do not consider how their actions affect others, so if you make it very clear to the customer how his or her thoughtlessness and/or inability to stick to a schedule has caused problems for you, this could really have an impact.

Regrettably, I suspect that there will always be customers who procrastinate when it comes to taking care of their own responsibilities, and that there will always be those who do not value the work others do and the time it takes. In the past few weeks alone, for example, a colleague gave me a translation assignment that she could no longer do it because it had arrived late, and I also edited an entire book in just a few (very long) days, because the customer had not planned well for the editing process. But I believe that we can eliminate some of these situations by educating our customers more. Once they begin to truly understand how much time our work takes, which they can only do if we explain the process to them in detail, and once we have begun teaching them that they can not send us documents late and/or expect assignments done very quickly, which we can do by warning our customers and/or refusing jobs and/or asking for rush or late fees, they will start both planning their time and their projects better and treating us with more respect. And isn’t it time that happened?

Which Books to Translate?

A recent article asked experts which books should be translated to English. Some of the suggestions included Israeli author Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s Adom Atik (Ancient Red), Indian Manzoor Ahtesham’s Dastan-e Lapata (The Tale of the Missing Person), Norwegian Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, Hvor Ble Det av Deg i Alt Mylderet? (Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?), and Cuban Ena Lucía Portela’s Cien Botellas en una Pared (A Hundred Bottles on the Wall).

If I were asked about Swedish literature, I think I’d recommend some of the children’s books. Swedish children’s literature is really good (it’s not just Pippi Longstocking!), which I discovered when I first moved to Sweden six years ago and learned Swedish in large part by reading children’s books. Some favorite authors include Gunilla Bergström (I adore her Alfons Åberg series), Inger and Lasse Sandberg, and Maria Gripe, but there are many other talented writers whose work I’d like to see in English.

What do you think? Which books from other languages do you believe should be translated to English?

In Memoriam: Poet and Translator Michael Hamburger

Translator and poet Michael Hamburger has passed away. He was born in Germany to a Jewish family who emigrated to the U.K. and he became a translator of works primarily from German. The authors he translated included Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Nelly Sachs, Charles Baudelaire, Gunter Grass, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and also Marin Sorescu, whom Mr. Hamburger worked on in a relay translation from Romanian to German to English.

As an obituary describes: the “author of more than 20 volumes of poetry and many volumes of essays, whose seminal study of the tensions in European poetry, The Truth of Poetry (1969), the critic Michael Schmidt has ranked alongside William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis or Donald Davies’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Hamburger often joked - not without rancour - about British reviewers of his poetry who would “brand” him “better known as a translator”, or a “passionate breeder of rare apples” (which he was), or “a renowned German poet”.”

In an interview, Mr. Hamburger explained how he got into translation and how it related to his work as a translator: “Translation came naturally to me because as a child I was translated from Germany to Britain. So I began to translate when I was still at school, also choosing to specialize in what was called Modern Languages and amounted to French and German. One of my earliest translations was of the prose poems of Baudelaire, and as a soldier in Italy I also taught myself Italian, so as to be able to read Dante. Though I specialized more and more in German, from time to time I continued to translate from other languages.

“Translation, to me, was an activity separate from the writing of my own poems – rather as, for musicians, composition is separate from performance or the interpretation of other people’s music. I don’t ask myself whether my translations are creative. It's enough for me if they serve a useful purpose. Some of them were important enough to me to occupy me almost throughout my long life – like Hölderlin, with successive editions from 1943 to 2005. Towards the end of my life, though, I had to give up translating, so as to be able to concentrate entirely on my own poems.”

Also in the interview, he described how he thought of his work as a translator and that as a poet: “All I can say is that as a translator I have tried to get as close as possible not only to the semantics of the work translated, but to its way of breathing – which, to me, is the most essential characteristic of any poetic text.…All a poet can do is to write the poems he or she is impelled to write – just as nearly all my translations were of work that impelled me for one reason or another, since I was never a professional translator dependent on commissions.”

Impelled to write and impelled to translate, and in both cases searching for the way a work breathes.

A Round-Up of Articles

Ordinarily, when I see an article on language, translation, or literature, I like to write a whole post about it, but in recent days, there’ve been so many interesting pieces that I thought the best thing to do would be to have a round-up of them all in one post.

The first article is from Scientific American and it talks about tonal and nontonal languages and brain development. Scientists have found that people who speak nontonal languages (such as English) have a newer versions of two genes that may affect the cerebral cortex than those who speak tonal languages (such as Chinese).

The second piece is an editorial by Stephen Benjamin, a gay man trained as an Arabic translator, who was forced to leave the U.S. Army because of his sexual orientation. At a time when there is such a need for Arabic (and other) translators, it seems extremely short-sighted (not to mention offensive) for the military to continue to have such a policy.

Next is an e-panel on literary translation, featuring translators Howard Curtis, Katherine Silver, Paul Olchvary, and Richard Jeffrey Newman. They talk about which languages they work with (French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, and classical Persian), how they began translating, how fast they translate, and other topics. Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

The fourth and final article is from the Times Literary Supplement and it is about the poet Ted Hughes and his work as a translator. He apparently translated from at least fourteen languages, some of which he didn’t actually know. Clive Wilmer, a poet and translator himself, explores connections between various translations by Hughes and Hughes’ own poetry. Mr. Wilmer writes, “In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in and which therefore appears to defy the truism we began with [i.e. that translation is imperfect and maybe even impossible].” Thank you to novelist Steven Russell-Thomas for sending me this article!

Enjoy these articles!

Nordic Translation Conference

I am planning a Nordic Translation Conference, which will take place in London next March. Some of you who read this blog might be interested in attending or even presenting, or you might have friends or colleagues who would like to know about the conference, so I am posting the first call for papers here.

Nordic Translation Conference

First Call for Papers

The Nordic Translation Conference will take place in London at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies on 7 and 8 March, 2008.

For the first time, a major conference is being planned all about Nordic translation. While many conferences on translation frequently include a presentation or two that mention Nordic issues, however peripherally, there has not yet been an event solely dedicated to the particular challenges and pleasures of translating between and among the Nordic countries, which are often closely related culturally, if not always linguistically. It should be exciting for academics and translators working on and with the Nordic languages to gather, discuss, and exchange ideas. The speakers will include Douglas Robinson, Kirsten Malmkjær, Tiina Nunnally, and Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown.

The conference will look at literary and non-literary translation of all kinds, including interpreting and subtitling, both between various Nordic languages and also between English and the Nordic languages. Nordic here includes Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, any of the Sámi dialects, and Swedish. Topics can include, but are not limited to, specific linguistic issues involved in translation/interpretation between two or more languages, analysis of particular texts/genres, professional issues, the translator/interpreter’s role, and the effect of cultural similarities/differences among Nordic countries. Both academics and practicing translators are encouraged to attend and present at the conference.

Please send proposals for conference papers (250-400 words) and a brief biographical note by 10 August 2007 to B.J. Epstein by e-mail or to her c/o French Department, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales, or by fax to +44 1792 295978.