The great translator Gregory Rabassa was once asked whether he knew enough Spanish to pull off his latest project—the project being Marquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rabassa replied, “You’re asking me the wrong question.
The right question to ask is whether I know enough English!”
Rabassa probably encapsulated the most important advice for translators in that short comment. When you set out to make a book or story available in a new language, your mastery over the target language is what counts. The very same thing, after all, can be said in multiple ways, each with a subtly different connotation, and you need to understand these connotations well.
The best translations read like an original work in the target language—a word-for-word translation will not get the point across. Otherwise we’d have machines to do it for us.
Which reminds me of another famous story in translation lore: A machine was asked to translate “Out of sight, out of mind,” to Russian and then back to English, and it turned the proverb into “Invisible idiot”.
And here’s an example of translation done right: In the Asterix comic albums (originally in French), Asterix’s dog is named Idefix—a joke on the French Idee Fixe. The very talented translator, Anthea Bell, turned this into the English Dogmatix, from Dogmatic, but also including the “Dog” prefix. Consider the thematic similarities of the two source words and you’ll see why this is a brilliant job.
Just as important as getting the language right is getting the genre right. All types of writing—whether literary, crime, biography or historical—have their own subtle genre conventions. Along with them come specific vocabulary choices, descriptive styles, and formatting. And these often differ from language to language.
When I previously translated crime novels from Hindi to English, for example, I replaced the normal-sounding opening sentence in Hindi with a very short, snappy one in English. Multiple reviews acknowledged that as the original writer’s style, however, this was not a convention in Hindi, but in English crime fiction.
Similarly, note the conversational English used by Coleman Barks in his superb translations from Rumi—the style, the conventions, the vocabulary are all staples of modern poetry, not of Rumi’s originals. More straitjacketed translations of Rumi tend to sound stilted, and Barks sidesteps this issue.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as straying too far from your source. You do want the original flavour of the text to come through at chosen points.
Think of the original text as an additional layer of location setting that needs to be visible. Note the very strategically placed Japanese words in the Keigo Higashino detective thrillers—they could have been replaced by reasonably close English equivalent, but the flavour of Japan comes through in those few words left in the original.
Try not to require a glossary or dictionary for the meanings—it should be reasonably clear from the context itself. So in a recent social story set in Uttar Pradesh, I kept the original “aala” as it was, and referred to it again as a stethoscope for clarification.
Over all, what counts is the readability of the final piece.