Dear writer, you’ve just written a story in a language of your choice. Probably the one you live in. And now it’s going to be translated into a different language—one that may well have little in common with yours. From origins to syntax, from pitch to structure, it may be quite a different beast.
And then there’s the reader of the translated story. Possibly someone from a different part of the world, without access to the knowledge and cultural signs that you take for granted in your own reader. However carefully the words and phrases are translated from your language to this new one, you wonder whether the implicit elements will be carried across too. It’s not unusual for you to be nervous.
As a translator, I hear your worry. I have my own concerns too. When I’m translating, say, a Bangla story into English, I am full of anxiety: Will I be able to take across everything that this story written in a language I live in—and not just write or read—into the language I’m translating into? And then, what of the English I’ll use, which is my own in a unique way but perhaps not the English the reader of the translated story is entirely accustomed to?
Finding the equivalent of words and phrases is the least of the problems. To be sure, sometimes the language I’m translating into will not have precise equivalents, but the meaning can always be conveyed by opening up the word or phrase and passing on some of the context when needed. The ‘stealth gloss’, as it’s often referred to, weaves these explanations into the text, maintaining the tone, without making them seem like footnotes.
Some translators also leave those particular words and phrases untranslated, to indicate to the reader that they represent things outside the scope of experience and knowledge in the new language. The key thing, however, is that the distance created this way between the reader and an unfamiliar concept should not alter the reading experience.
The first thing I focus on when translating is the relationship of the ‘source’ language in the story to its standard version—the one that the majority reads and understands easily. Does the story use the language differently? Is it experimental? Does it try to do new things? Does it work in an unusual register? I try to ensure that the language I use in my translation maintains the same relationship with the standard version, such as it is, of the ‘target’ language. Changing this relationship is bound to take away a great deal from the story.
Next, what is the reading experience of the original? Does the reader sail through the text? Or are they deliberately made to stop and think about what they’re reading? My endeavour is to reproduce the same experience as far as possible.
Finally, there’s the question of how the story is being read by the translator before taking it into a new language. This is a fraught question. My own practice is not to read a story in only one way, but to enable my translation to be read in all the myriad ways in which the original can be read. The idea is not to narrow down the options, but to preserve them or even widen them in some cases.
For me, it is important that the translation does not create the illusion that the story began life in the language it’s been translated into. But I don’t deliberately distort the use of the English language to remind the reader of this. The fact is that the original language works with a different set of notes, which the writer uses to compose a work that is much like a piece of music. Translation is like playing those same notes but on a different instrument, which adheres to the specifications of this new instrument and does not try to sound like the original one.
In sum, your story, dear writer, does not exist in just the dictionary meaning of the words alone—it is all these other elements that make it what it is. And while the translated version will never be identical to the one you wrote, if only because the new language has its own way of working, the translated version will give it a new life that can be as vibrant as the one that you gave it. Trust the translator.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Bengali and Hindi into English. He also translates fiction and poetry from English and Hindi into Bengali. Over 96 of his translations have been published so far in India, the UK, the USA, and Australia. He teaches at Ashoka University, where he is also the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation, and is the Books Editor at Scroll.in.
This blog has been translated into Bengali, Chinese, French, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Maltese, Portuguese, Tamil and Turkish. Thank you to Arunava and our other translators—respectively Christina Ng, Edwige Dro, Lina Protopapa, Richard Mabala, Pauline Fan, Matthew Borg, Silvia D.Schiros, Janani Ambikapathy, and Berrak Gocer—for making these insights more widely accessible.
