The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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thelinguist.uberflip.com DECEMBER 2016/JANUARY 2017 The Linguist 9 FEATURES It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with quality; it may just be whether I have an affinity with it. Do you ever put forward books to publishers? I don't do it often but if there's a book that I think has to be translated into English then you can bet I will start pulling the limited strings I have at my disposal. Years ago, I was asked by Bloomsbury to translate a book by Tim Krabbé called The Cave. I had read a book by the same author called The Rider, a book about bicycle racing. It's a strange hybrid: is it fiction, is it non-fiction, who knows, who cares, it reads like a novel. So I started promoting it with Bloomsbury. It's now a cult classic in the UK, Australia, America, so I am really glad I pushed that, because I don't think they would have done it otherwise. How important is it to translate literature in order to give readers a chance to experience other cultures? I think it's vital, not only to let people see that there are other cultures – other worlds – that they didn't know about, but also to show how much shared experience there is; how much the experience of teenagers, for example, in the Netherlands in 1947 resembles that in Great Britain in the 1960s or even today. You are the only translator to have won the British Society of Authors' Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation twice. Do you think such awards are important? Yes. They are recognition that the translator has played a significant role in creating an English version of this book that has pleased a number of people. Of course, there's a paradox there, as you want to be pretty much invisible but, at the same time, everybody wants to be praised. The prize money is also often very welcome; it can give translators room to go on. It may allow them to translate things that will never make money – poets they may be fond of that then inspire another poet to write something. What are you working on at present? I'm on an unofficial sabbatical because I've been translating books back-to-back for the last five years. Sometimes you have to sit back and take a deep breath. I was talking before about the translator being an imitator, and you do have an awful lot of people's voices echoing inside your head. Sometimes it's very pleasant to not have that, to listen to your own voice for a while. PROLIFIC Works by Tommy Wieringa (left), translated by Sam Garrett (below) want to re-write an author's book; I don't think that's what I'm being asked to do. But in those cases where I think that the author's intent is not served by that approach, I will try to get closer to their intent and worry a little less about the semi-colons and that kind of thing. All conscientious translators are after the same thing, I think we just talk about it in different terms. Do you tend to consult the authors? When I'm ready to send my translation to the publisher, I ask the author to read it through and see if I've made any major blunders. In non-fiction I need to consult more often. Engineers of the Soul is a good example because it's about Soviet literature and often Frank Westerman would use Russian terms. I don't speak Russian, so I wasn't sure whether I was capturing the nuances, and I would sit down with Frank and ask him about that. How do your approaches to fiction and non-fiction differ? Non-fiction is very labour intensive. It's also great fun. You learn a huge amount, but it's demanding. Maybe due to my background in journalism, I am comfortable with the level of research, precision and concision. How do you choose what to work on? If I'm enthusiastic about a book I snap it up.