Category archives: blog

La azotea

#Coronavirusplays Un hombre, de unos 50 años. En su acento se mezcla lo gaditano con lo extranjero ¡Coño! Llego a la puta playa y me la han cerrado. Allí está. Al otro lado de unas vallas cutres y una cinta de esas de plástico. ¿Será por los madrileños? ¿Los que han bajado a Cádiz, huyendo more »

What’s in a word?

Translators have a very intimate relationship with words. We are hypersensitive to nuance, tone, connotations, register… It’s something we are particularly aware of at those moments when we hit on that perfect translation, the word or phrase that captures the original – whether directly, because they match those of the original – or indirectly because more »

Food for thought: talking to Tim Parks about translation as reading and writing (1)

I recently had to write a short piece to accompany a translation of mine and found myself torn between discussing the big issues I felt I “ought” to talk about (shifting narrative perspectives, cultural references, etc.) and the more nitty-gritty questions that, for me, represented the real challenges of the translation. But when I started more »

Pitch perfect: is translating publishers’ proposals the hardest gig of all?

I’ve just reached the end of my first year of describing myself as a literary translator. This does not, unfortunately, mean that I’ve spent the last twelve months translating high-quality fiction for discerning independent presses. Instead, the bulk of my work continues to be non-literary: academic papers, documentation for NGOs, corporate communications. My literary work, more »

Aeolian harps and alien trinkets: talking to Tim Parks about translating style

It often seems as if there is only one debate in literary translation, despite our ingenuity in coming up with new terms to describe it. Is translation a discipline or an art? Are we “text-oriented” or “reader-oriented”? Are we literalists or activists? Sometimes, this dichotomy is expressed in metaphorical terms. You can choose old-world sexism: more »

ITI Scottish Network summer workshop: collaborative professional development for translators

Aberdour, 1 June 2019 Three years ago, Victoria Patience, Simon Berrill and Tim Gutteridge were looking for ways to improve the quality of our work. We realised we couldn’t afford to have each and every one of our texts professionally revised by another translator, so we decided that, instead of focusing on improving individual translations, more »

“In the blacksmith’s house…”: linguistic border guard or linguistic nomad?

Translators like to think that we facilitate communication, building linguistic bridges between the speakers (or readers) of one language and those of another. But that’s only half the story. In this job of mediating between two languages we are – we must be – almost neurotically aware of what belongs where. More specifically (although it’s more »