{"id":426902,"date":"2019-10-22T12:08:29","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T16:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=426902"},"modified":"2019-10-22T12:08:29","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T16:08:29","slug":"a-good-exciting-translation-btba-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/10\/22\/a-good-exciting-translation-btba-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"A Good, Exciting Translation [BTBA 2020]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Elisa Wouk<\/strong><\/em> Almino<\/em>, <\/strong>a writer and literary translator from Portuguese. She is currently the L.A. senior editor at <\/em>Hyperallergic and an editor of Harlequin creature\u2019s online translation platform. She teaches translation at Catapult and UCLA Extension.<\/em><\/p>\n

I teach an online beginner\u2019s translation class. On the first class, I ask students to briefly review a work in translation (I give them the option between a short story and a poem). The task, at first, seems hard. I\u2019ll get questions like: Can I really judge this if I don\u2019t know the original language or haven\u2019t read the original? How do I know if it\u2019s good? I tell them to evaluate a translation like any text: Analyze the use of language, the tone, the imagery. Is it clear and vivid? Elegant and fluid? The big news flash of this exercise: The qualities of the work are partly thanks to the efforts of your translator.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Over the course of six weeks, we continue to debate what makes a good translation and how to make our own translations as best as they can be. There are no straightforward answers. We talk about whether translations should necessarily cater to American-style sentence structures, or whether there is a value in challenging the English-language reader with atypical syntax. We compare multiple translations of the same texts, and in realizing how drastically different they can be, we conclude that a translator and her perspective can have a great influence.<\/p>\n

For this prize, I\u2019ve received so far around fifty books, originally written in at least ten different languages, and I only know three of those languages (Portuguese, French, and I can get by with Spanish). The stories range from a man who keeps a notebook of handwriting exercises (Empty Words<\/em><\/a> by Mario Levrero, translated by Annie McDermott), to a thriller where young boys keep mysteriously jumping into the train tracks of Buenos Aires (The Fragility of Bodies <\/em><\/a>by Sergio Olgu\u00edn, translated by Miranda France). Many of the authors are new to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As a judge, I feel I must not only look for a good translation, but also for an exciting <\/em>one. Is the translator making surprising or risky choices, and succeeding? Is the author\u2019s voice startling and unfamiliar? Has the story or narrative been overtold or not expressed enough? Who is the translator and what kind of work have they been committed to? Like my students, I acknowledge that it\u2019s not an easy task to evaluate translations, mainly because there is a lot of work that goes into considering them\u2014we\u2019re not only dealing with the books themselves, but the many contexts that surround them.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, I have the most fun obsessively pondering things like word choices and the shapes of sentences in translations. For example, the first chapter of Alia Trabucco Zer\u00e1n\u2019s The Remainder<\/em><\/a>, titled \u201c11,\u201d is two pages long but just one sentence. As a translator, I am in awe of how the prose flows, so I pause at each comma and conjunction, figuring out how translator Sophie Hughes made the English version read so effortlessly. Over the next few months, I suspect I\u2019ll sit with all kinds of puzzles. In the meantime, I look forward to encountering not just new authors, but also new translators, who challenge and amaze me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Elisa Wouk Almino, a writer and literary translator from Portuguese. She is currently the L.A. senior editor at Hyperallergic and an editor of Harlequin creature\u2019s online translation platform. She teaches translation at Catapult and UCLA Extension. I teach an online beginner\u2019s translation class. On the first class, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":426912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[69572,69742],"class_list":["post-426902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2020","tag-elisa-wouk-almino"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426902"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":426932,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426902\/revisions\/426932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}