Translation seems to be having a moment—or a series of moments, that could turn into new reading and publishing habits. At least I hope so! Of course there are specific magazines devoted to new writing in translation, such as Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and Asymptote. But it’s also wonderful to see general literary…
A leading translation theorist, Lawrence Venuti, talks about “domestication” versus “foreignization” when translating fiction. “Domestication” means making the foreign familiar, and Venuti rails against it. In fact, many aspects of the text—references, syntax, expressions—need to be made familiar so that the reader will not be confused or alienated, but that’s a topic for another post.…
When The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction by Amy J. Schneider was published this spring, I grabbed a copy as soon as possible. This book came out just as I have been expanding my translation business to provide copyediting services for fiction in translation, and it has turned out to be a very valuable resource.…
I had never thought about the concept of “flow” in connection with translation until I attended a talk by Evgeny Terekhin at the 2020 conference of the American Translators Association. Evgeny described translating in the flow state and said he could tell when reading a translation if a translator was working in this state or…
I’ve been thinking lately about a thought-provoking conversation from a while back between translators Tim Gutteridge and Tim Parks about how to approach the translation process. I am especially drawn to this formulation by Parks: “Once we have read and really got close to the text, then writing well in the target language is a…
Last night, in the gilded reception room of the French Embassy, Négar Djavadi and her translator Tina Kover accepted the Albertine Prize for Disoriental, published by Europa Editions. From a shortlist of five novels published within the last year, readers had voted to give the award to Djavadi’s first novel, the tale of a young…
Short Edition is a French online publisher making short stories available to readers in French and English. There is a range of genres, including romance and science fiction and fantasy, and the stories are sorted according to how long it takes to read them: 1 minute, 3 minutes, or 5 minutes. In 2016, Short Edition…
There tend to be a lot of summer reading lists, but what about winter reading? When the weather gets frigid, there’s nothing better than curling up on the couch with a good book. Here are seven great books in translation published in 2017 that I’m excited to recommend to you as the days get shorter.…
It was wonderful to celebrate the launch of the Albertine Prize last night, a new readers’ prize for French fiction published in English translation in 2016, and to discover the shortlist of 10 books. The event was rescheduled from March 14 due to the blizzard, and although there were still mountains of snow in the streets,…
Everyone knows Brooklyn is the most literary of boroughs. Case in point: last Thursday I went to a reading at Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights (a great place for browsing and the kind of used bookstore you just don’t see so much anymore, unfortunately) to hear Tom Whalen, who was my writing teacher at the New…