The art of translation

To translate, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is ‘to turn into one’s own or another language’.

That dictionary definition is not inaccurate, but when it comes to literary translation, it also doesn’t encompass the depth and breadth of what translators do. Cambridge Dictionary perhaps comes closer with one of its definitions, describing the action of translating as ‘to change something into a new form’, although that’s still not quite right.

Translator and Chair of the 2022 International Booker Prize Frank Wynne says that yes, you do ‘take a text in one language and you recreate that text in another language, but that sounds disarmingly simple’.

‘In fact you need to pay attention, not just to the meaning of words, but to how they fit together,’ he continues. ‘What the cadence or the rhythm of the sentence is, what the humour or irony in a sentence is, what cultural connotations it might have.’

Perhaps the mystery of translation is best summed up by Jamie Chang, who translated Cho Nam-ju’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and is also translating the author’s forthcoming book Saha. She describes the process as ‘like taking a watercolour on paper landscape painting and copying it in oil on canvas – same landscape, different everything else’. 

Wynne adds: ‘Mostly it requires you to listen very intently to the voice that you can hear in the text and recreate that voice in your own language.’

Among those adventurous small publishers is Charco Press, which in 2022 had Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle, on the International Booker Prize shortlist. Samuel McDowell, publisher at Charco Press, says that like all books, translated literature ‘offers the reader the opportunity for escapism, for adventure, to have a laugh, and to be provoked’.

‘What translation offers on top of this is the ability to experience it all from someone who perhaps has had very different life experiences to the reader, who grew up and lives in a different country with a different culture,’ he adds. ‘It provides a window onto experiences with a new perspective, whilst also allowing the reader to appreciate that many aspects of human life are universal. It helps us better understand and appreciate each other.’

Like any discovery, there can be both an excitement around translated fiction, as well as a slight nervousness. Include the words ‘and it’s a novel in translation’ in any pitch for a book to your average reader, and there might be a slight hesitation. Will this book be inaccessible? Will its form be obscure and unrecognisable? Will it be worthy rather than entertaining?

But, points out Rocco, translated fiction has been of our canon for such a long time that we often ascribe an Englishness to writers who in fact wrote in other languages. 

‘The single most common misconception about reading ‘foreign’ fiction, as it used to be called, or fiction in translation is that it’s somehow different or even unknown and because it’s unknown it’s difficult,’ says Rocco. ‘But if you think of Tolstoy, or Proust or Chekhov or Thomas Mann, very few of us would know their work if it weren’t for having read it in translation. Yet they are such staples of the literature we read growing up that we don’t think of them primarily as translated fiction; we take their translation for granted and almost think of them as English.’

Some of those barriers people felt stood in the way of reading in translation have likely been broken down by the success of a few key stories, such as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.

And of course, much more recently, English-speaking people have been consuming television in other languages in their droves, from Money Heist (Spanish) to Squid Game (Korean).

Wynne agrees, pointing out that the same book in the hands of three different translators would result in three different versions of it in English.

‘Not only that, but if you ask me today, you’ll get a different book than you would’ve got two years ago, or than you will get two years from now,’ says Wynne. ‘Translation is a performance that takes place in a particular place at a particular time and is then set down. It’s influenced by everything that we read and everything we listen to and all of the plays we watch in all of the movies we see and so on and so forth. All of these things can feed into the language that we have available to us that we may use.’

Every translator approaches a work differently. Wynne says he likes to read the book for pleasure first ‘because I want to experience what it’s like just to read the book’. 

‘I tend to do quite a detailed first draft,’ he continues. ‘I tend to tackle the more difficult problems if I can in the first draft. And I leave myself little notes and little footnotes and whatever of things that I want to come back to and want to do again. And I will do most of my research when I’m doing my first draft.’

What feels right for the story is a difficult thing to identify, but just as a translator knows it when it comes to their work, a reader will also be able to judge whether a translation is good. 

‘I think really you judge translations in the way that you judge all other books,’ says Wynne. ‘You pick up the book and if it speaks to you, and if you race through it and at the end of it, desperately want to give it to somebody else to read, then you’ve got not just a good book, but a good translator.’

As we consume more fiction in translation, it’s like we’ll discover more books from further afield or in languages we didn’t expect; Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, is the first book written in Hindi to make any of the International Booker Prize lists, and it won the 2022 prize on May 26. Speaking at the press conference announcing Shree and Rockwell as the winners, Wynne said very few books are translated from Indian languages ‘despite the fact that Britain has a very long relationship with the Indian subcontinent’.