Working Backwards
B.J. Epstein

What is translation?

Frankly, that’s too hard of a question, so let’s start with an easier one, and work backwards. What isn’t translation?

Translation is definitely not – despite what many people believe – simply looking up words in a bilingual dictionary and then writing down their equivalents in another language. It is true, of course, that translation means the "carrying across" of a text from one tongue to another, but it is about so much more than individual words. The context is essential, as is the culture behind all those words. If a translator can’t understand what is said in a text and why and how that connects to the language and its culture as a whole, no pile of dictionaries is going to be able to explain that to her/him. Translators need to be language experts and culture experts; translation is (we’re getting a little closer to an answer now!) a form of linguistic-based anthropology, or maybe that should be anthropology-based linguistics, or, in reality, both.

But that’s not all, even if it’s a good beginning (did you think it was enough?). Translation is not just a matter of picking up a pen (or pecking at a keyboard) and blindly following whatever the author has said, presuming of course that the translator has done her/his linguistic and anthropological work and has understood the text in question and the words within it and the culture and background that informs those words. Translation is not a mechanical activity. Translators are also creative writers; they have to have excellent writing and editing skills in their mother tongue, because their job is to recreate this text in that language. To translate is also to write, to become the voice of that author and that novel or poem (or story or play or essay, etc.). It is acting, with the difference that the product is not a movie but a text. Therefore the translator must be a confident and talented actor and writer, ready to say what has been said before, but in a new language, in new circumstances, for a new audience.

Did I mention the audience? What do they have to do with the translator’s task? Well, readers tend to have expectations for the texts they read; likewise, publishers have expectations for the work they publish, and book-sellers and librarians for the work they make available to consumers, and so on. There’s a long chain of expectations facing the translator, and this can turn into pressure to translate in a certain way and to make texts from the source culture conform to the ideas about literature and demands from the target culture. Translation is not reshaping texts to fit what the audience or market expects or requires. Translators consider norms and are familiar with literature in both cultures, but they generally should not rewrite the work to serve a specific purpose or to suit a specific style. It’s a balancing act, and they want to serve the text and its author as well as the audience.

By discussing what translation is not, we have now gotten to the point where we can safely (I hope!) say that a translator is a bilingual, bicultural, linguist / anthropologist / writer / actor / editor who executes the delicate task of performing and recreating a text in a new language and culture, while both considering the author’s, text’s, audience’s, and market’s needs and expectations, and also, as necessary, disregarding them.

Phew! If it was this difficult to define translation, can you imagine what it must be like to actually do it?

About the Author: Originally from Chicago, Brett Jocelyn Epstein now lives in Wales, where she works as a writer, copy editor, and Swedish to English translator, and is a PhD student in translation studies. Her first book, a textbook for use in English as a foreign language classes, was published in October 2005. Visit her website at www.awaywithwords.se/ or her translation blog at http://brave-new-words.blogspot.com/ for more information on her or on translation.