Translation as a way of being

I’m no longer able to imagine my life without translating: I translate every day of my life, at home, at work (I’ve worked as a university instructor and researcher in various countries, and as a translator and interpreter), in my free time, and often even in my sleep. It’s nothing new to me any more, but that’s not how it always was. I had a monolingual childhood and youth, and although my family took an interest in foreign languages, I ended up in the crossfire of foreign languages only later, as an adult.

So how did I become a translator of Finnish literature? Partly by design, partly in a kind of automatic, unconscious way. Even in high school I knew that I wanted to eventually do work that had something to do with literature, and this conviction solidified when I was accepted into the university. After a few reversals, I found my focus and specialised in Finnish literature, and I started to study literature as well as translate it. It is well-known that every translation is an interpretation, and a translator can’t defend her translation if she can’t defend her interpretation. But translating was also somehow a matter of course, which is no doubt due to the linguistic and cultural environment that I come from. In the Czech Republic, as in many other small countries, scholars of literature have very often also functioned as translators of literature, although there have also always been people who specialise in one or the other.

I don’t claim that it’s absolutely essential to study a language at a university if you want to translate. Many wonderful translators have learned a language and become involved in representing a culture in other ways. Based on my own experience, however, I would say that studying a language at the university level made things significantly easier. In many countries the university is, for some reason, the only place where you can properly learn a language. To be precise, university studies offer the kind of language that is used in literature, and knowledge of the culture connected with language that a literary translator will need to know one way or another – knowledge which is hard to come by anyplace else. The competent interpretation of literature mentioned above requires the most thorough possible knowledge of all of the contexts of literature (literary, historic, social, etc.).

Courage, perseverance, and humility

Like any profession, translation requires a decent dose of courage, perseverance, and humility. You have to be courageous in order to take up translating and offer your translations for publication. At this phase, it’s important to encounter good, fair criticism, which can come from a university instructor, a publishing editor, or an older and more experienced translator who will encourage you in your work while also knowing how to point out errors. I was lucky in this. The ideal situation is to seek advisors who know the source language as well as those who don’t. This is the only way to discover both awkward constructions that are too close to the original language and errors caused by insufficient comprehension of the original language. Beginning translators (and experienced ones, too, of course!) are guilty of both. Recently, for very good reason, there is an emphasis on beginning translators’ inability to break away from the original text and create a literary work anew in another language, which is the translator’s primary task. Based on my experience as a translator and translation instructor, however, I believe that this “affliction”, which almost every beginning translator suffers from, can be healed more easily than excessive domination of the text. A young translator’s ability to produce a believable text in the target language at the very beginning of her career is often seen as a purely positive thing. It is undoubtedly a wonderful thing. But if problem areas are skirted in the process, a translator can have a shaky foundation even if she is able to produce a text that feels believable in the target language.

In translating, there are an awful lot of things that are a matter of taste. You can also call it using various strategies, which sounds fancier. The point is that translating is both an art and a science. There’s no denying that you need talent to even consider this profession. A translator should also have the characteristics of a scholar – she should have an interest and ability in many different kinds of research. Expressions like “successful translation”, “too free a translation”, or “mistranslation” are understood differently by almost every translator and reader. A professional translator must, however, have her own philosophy in order to defend her translations and choose her strategies. Translations can have very different solutions, but you should know why they have been chosen and be able to justify them. And that’s where the “scientific” aspect of translation comes in, which brings us back to the question of competent interpretation.

All of this is connected with humility, which is, I think, an integral part of the process of translating, although I also join the fight against the underestimation of translation and on behalf of visibility for translators. The hierarchy of the original text and the translation is often questioned and problematized from different angles, which is, I think, very correct. Nevertheless, I think that as a translator I am in the service of the original text and its creator, and I am responsible to them, even as I am also creating a new artistic totality. If the idea of service is out of the question for you, then you would probably prefer becoming a writer, rather than a translator.

A translator’s many faces

I have experienced the tight symbiosis between the identity of translator, scholar, and teacher as a very positive thing. It is a tremendous advantage for a translator to work with literature in as many different ways as are possible in an institution. As a translator, I have exploited my experiences as both a student and teacher of Finnish literature and literary studies. As a scholar, my interpretations of literature have benefited from my translating. Literary reviews are different than book endorsements, which publishers often request from translators, but writing reviews is good practice for writing endorsements. I have always found great benefits from translation workshops in my role as a student as well as an instructor.

Book fairs in different countries have also been very important to me. At book fairs, you can familiarise yourself with different aspects of literature, such as marketing, which is good to know about. You can also learn about publishers’ profiles and specialities, and get to know publishers’ representatives. That’s especially important, particularly if you want to translate Finnish literature that you have chosen yourself. Hardly anyone will knock on a beginning translator’s door – you have to be active on your own behalf, present yourself to literary journals and editors and suggest appropriate texts for them. The process is different in each country, but some kind of “translator’s portfolio” that includes your CV, suggested texts for translation and information about their authors, and samples of your work, certainly couldn’t hurt. An aptitude for marketing, in the best sense of the word, is especially necessary nowadays. It can also be accomplished by email, of course, but, particularly in certain cultures, personal contacts are indispensable; for this reason book fairs and other publishing events can be very significant.

Help from colleagues

After publishing some short translations in literary journals, a translator can use these in her “portfolio” when suggesting longer translations to publishers. As is often said, it’s always good to begin with short texts and only gradually shift to larger projects. I myself have followed this path. I am grateful to experienced colleagues with influence at literary journals for the first opportunities to get my translations published. Since then, I have tried to function in the same way, to help and advise younger translators and to recommend them to publishers and literary editors. At Charles University in Prague about 10 years ago, we created a collection of translations by students. There have been similar projects elsewhere. Solidarity among translators should be automatic, because jealousy is extremely short-sighted. You should remember that the more books that are published from a particular cultural area, the more demand there will be for them, because both readers and publishers will become familiar with the literature and – provided, of course, that the translations, and the original works, are good ones! – they will want more. Abundant offerings open up markets and create new work opportunities for everyone.

I have always stressed that translating is a process of dialogue, not just the translator’s dialogue with the text and its creators and readers, but also between translators. In my own family this dialogue even happens at home, and is connected with “living in the crossfire of languages”. My husband, Italian translator Antonio Parente and I continuously discuss all of our translation work. I’ve learned the very most from this dialogue. The loss of a boundary between work and free time hasn’t been a handicap – translating is our greatest hobby.

Translated by Lola Rogers

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