I translate books for a living. AMA + recommendations thread

[FuckRealityBringMeABook]

Hi everyone, it is the feast day of Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation and International Translation Day. I translate books for a living. Anyone want to ask any questions or recommend a translated book they have read?

No, it pays pretty badly and I need a steady income for family reasons so I combine it with other stuff in the publishing sphere, not all translation-related.

Michael Hoffman's translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the best books I have ever read. I haven't read the original, and I asked a German friend if he had read it, and he said no, it's long and challenging. Hoffman's translation didn't feel long at all, it races along and I found it a rush of adrenalin and full of everything from tenderness to shock. One review I read afterwards suggested that the pace of the English, with its shorter words, was different from the pace of the German. I can't say if that's true, but more generally, is it possible that a translation can be better (in some ways) than the original?

No, though I have heard lots about it of course. I tend not to read much in English these days (other than crime novels to switch off) as I am always on the lookout for the latest thing in other languages.

Absolutely they can be better, though it is usually considered heresy to say so. Some parts of the world have less robust editorial standards than Europe and the US so I would say if you put the translation through a stringent editing process the result could well be an improvement. I do a lot of fact-checking too and often catch howlers in the original.

Thank you for this thread OP, and the work you do. I love reading translated works.

I saw a talk once by a Japanese author and his translator and it was fascinating how she is very much regarded as the second author like you say. In their case some of the book had to be changed as it wouldn't make sense for an English audience without lengthy explanation and still flow well.

I was wondering how much of this you do? I am guessing with a European culture it might not occur as much. But thinking of ones like My Brilliant Friend where they had to explain dialect a bit

I've been working my way through Guy de Maupassant's works ( French translated into English) and I love them - witty, clever etc. Re his novel Bel Ami, the copy I read must've been translated quite a long time ago because it had some old-fashioned phrases, but I had no trouble understanding them and their wit, although I'm old and younger readers might not. I'm wondering if you think updating them would lose something? Because they're not close to the author's intention? I'm sure there are more modern translations.

Slightly off-topic, re Beowulf - Seamus Heanie's recent version keeps the rhythm and poetry, just like the one I originally read in the 1970s, but another recent version just tells it as a story and loses an awful lot of its charm, IMO.

If you can recommend some modern English translated crime, please? I could do with some new authors

Thank you for the AMA. Do authors tend to stick with one translator these days (so if book 1 of a series is a success, do you get the rest)?

Do you have to translate para for para, or can the translator apply a spot of judicious editing?

Do you sometimes listen to the audiobook version for guidance, or is that a distraction.

Yeah I do a fair amount of subtle add-ins to explain stuff that would not make sense, like describing where a place is geographically or who a person was historically.

This is a big debate. I have a fondness for translations that were done at the time because of the old-fashioned language, but by todays standards they can be quite inaccurate. I haven't read any Maupassant since school, I probably should!

Modern crime: I like the new Maigret versions and there is some good stuff coming out of Japan. Look for specialist publishers like Soho Crime, Bitter Lemon and Corylus.

Edit: forgot the rest of the questions! I don't get on with audiobooks personally. I do a fair amount of judicious pruning depending on who the author is. I wouldn't fiddle around with Shakespeare, if you see what I mean, but if I am working on a shonkily edited unknown author I would see it as doing them a favour streamlining their words. Some languages are naturally quite repetitive, to a level that really does not work in English.

Re-edit: on author-translator pairings, it really depends. If they get on well, the author might request them. Or the translator might be booked up and the project goes to someone else. Therevs no hard and fast rule.

There has been a bit of a fuss in gaming circles recently over people translating and adding their own politics into the translations (written and audio), including things like pronouns without having been asked to (some now being forced to remove them after grassing themselves up boasting they'd done it).

How can someone seeking localisation services be sure that the person doing the translation is not adding their own ideology into a translation without paying twice to have the first translation checked?

Have you read anything Icelandic? If not I can recommend the books by Arnaldur Indriđason, especially the Detective Erlendur series translated by Victoria Cribb. Her translations read beautifully. She has also translated Yrsa Sigurđadóttir, whose work includes crime fiction.

translation is inherently ideological. I don't work in gaming but I have been following the debate from a distance. I can see why, if players are likely to be happy with pronouns, the translator would add them of their own accord. IMO we need to be as mindful of our readers as we are of the original author.

good shout

How can someone seeking localisation services be sure that the person doing the translation is not adding their own ideology into a translation without paying twice to have the first translation checked?

The simple answer is talk to them and set out your expectations in a brief.

This is really interesting OP. I used to translate but couldn't make a living out of it so went into teaching instead. My question is - have you made any real gaffes and did they make it into print? 😁

I did make up a word once 😳when my kids were tiny and I was very sleep-deprived. It slipped through the net but no-one has ever spotted it AFAIK 😬 Occasional mistakes are unavoidable in big projects. Obviously there are processes in place to minimise them but it is like typos - you can never eradicate them completely.

I love this - thank you for your work. I was at an author event with Ann Cleeves who recommended reading crime fiction in translation as a great way of getting into the culture of a place. She recommended Johan Theorin who is excellent (Swedish) and I really like Jorn Lier Horst (Wisting novels) and Michel Bussi. More crime fiction in translation recommendations would be splendid!

Look at https://eurocrime.blogspot.com/

I would have loved to do translation but unfortunately only know French well enough to have been (or tried to be) a translator. And there are enough bilingual French/English speakers for the market to have already been saturated.

How did you learn your languages? Are you bilingual/trilingual/quadri from childhood or did you learn them subsequently?

Do you only really translate to one language or do you flit from book to book?

And do you ever translate eg from L2 to L3 or L4 or is it always L1 to L2 or vice versa?

Do you translate eg French originals into English (assuming English is your First Language) or would you translate from English into French?

I also love the Inspector Montalbano books written by Andrea Camilleri (RIP). There are lots of these, and the translator for (I think) all of them is Stephen Sartarelli. Wonderful work. And often Sartarelli did notes at the back explaining little things about Sicily that put (especially historical) events in context. I don't know if they were friends, but it feels that way.

I grew up in a bilingual family and added more languages at school. They always came easily to me. My work is mostly from one language with occasional forays into the others when the chance arises. I very occasionally work into my L2, as a favour, mainly, but I am slower that way round so I try and avoid it.

Oo this is so interesting! I did literary translation as an exercise every week at uni but a whole book must be so different.
Do you generally prefer to maintain more of the feel of the original language, or "transpose" it into an English-speaking culture? I have a strong preference for reading the former (perhaps as a bit of a languages and literature nerd), but I know other people who prefer the latter.
I'm thinking things like the older translation of Heidi which kept the German names of the goats vs the new translation which renamed them Little Swan and Little Bear. Or El placa del diamant, which has been translated as The Time of the Doves, which maintains a very Catalan flavour (in my opinion crucial) but also as In Diamond Square by Peter Bush, which reads almost as though it were set in Manchester and loses the Catalan-ness. I find that one particularly interesting because I can't read Catalan, so I'm reliant on piecing together translations into Castillian Spanish and English!

@RejoiceandSing that is another huge debate that has been going on for centuries. In the trade we call it domestication vs. foreignisation. The latter was out of fashion for a long time but is currently quite in. The idea is to make readers do a bit of work to put themselves in someone else's shoes rather than make it all easy and familiar. I used foreignisation in my most recent novel, including some words in the local dialect with a glossary at the end.

I once nearly came to blows with a language teacher about the translation of a word in Du côté du chez Swann. And I still think I was right.😀

Do you have thoughts on good translators of a particular author creating a bit of a vogue for them in a specific country? Alain Delahaye’s French translations of John McGahern have always seemed to me to account in part for his popularity in France, for instance. They had a strong bond, visiting back and forth, corresponding extensively, and when AH was commissioned to translate an early novel of JMcG’s, JMcG ended up essentially rewriting it and publishing a new version, as the translation process made him see its flaws.