Re:Bai Juyi: The Tang dynasty’s baldest poet
by sorokod on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:34PM
(#33087323)
I had a conversation about translations with an actual author, some things I learned from him
* It is not possible to specify in advance how a good translation looks like, it is one of those "I know it is good when I see it". Naturally this assumes that the author can read the destination language reasonably well, otherwise they don't have a clue.
* When authors can read the translation, they tend to feel very strongly about it. An author payed a large sum of money for a translation, hated it, binned it and payed another translator to start from scratch.
* Many good translators (by whatever good may mean here) are not authors themselves.
WRT Nabokov, some of his works were originally written in English - Lolita for example. He then went ahead and translated Lolita to Russian.
* It is not possible to specify in advance how a good translation looks like, it is one of those "I know it is good when I see it". Naturally this assumes that the author can read the destination language reasonably well, otherwise they don't have a clue.
* When authors can read the translation, they tend to feel very strongly about it. An author payed a large sum of money for a translation, hated it, binned it and payed another translator to start from scratch.
* Many good translators (by whatever good may mean here) are not authors themselves.
WRT Nabokov, some of his works were originally written in English - Lolita for example. He then went ahead and translated Lolita to Russian.