An Interview With a Working Translator

Translators are the closest readers a book will ever have. They cannot skim. They cannot let an approximate sentence pass. Every hedge, every lazy adjective, every rhythm that only works because English lets you get away with it — they find all of it.

I spoke with a translator who works between Portuguese and English about what that looks like from the inside. The conversation is condensed and lightly edited.

On the first read

What are you doing on the first pass?

Reading like a reader, deliberately. I do not take notes. If I start solving problems on page one I will translate a book I have not yet understood, and the second half will quietly contradict the first.

The questions I hold are simple. Who is telling this? How far from the events? Would this narrator use a long word if a short one existed? That last one decides a thousand later choices.

On what does not travel

What is genuinely untranslatable?

Register, more than vocabulary. Every language sorts its words into social layers and the layers do not line up. A word that is warm and slightly rural in one language becomes either neutral or comic in another. You are not looking for the same word. You are looking for the same distance between the word and the reader.

A translation is not a copy of the sentence. It is a copy of the effect, and you are allowed to build it out of completely different parts.

And rhythm?

Rhythm is the thing writers most underestimate and translators most fight over. A three-beat sentence has a feeling. If your target language needs five words where the original used three, you have to buy the beats back somewhere else in the paragraph. Sometimes you shorten the next sentence to compensate. The reader never notices, which is the job.

On what translation exposes

What do you learn about a writer that they might not know?

Their tics. Everyone has three or four sentence shapes they return to under pressure. In the original they are invisible because they sound like the writer's voice. In translation they become a pattern you have to consciously decide whether to preserve.

I once had to write to an author and say: you begin fourteen paragraphs in this chapter with a subordinate clause. Do you want that? He did not. He had never seen it.

Advice for writers

What would you tell someone writing in English who hopes to be translated?

Nothing, really — you should not write for translation. But if you want a diagnostic, read one chapter aloud to someone who speaks English as a second language and watch where they lose the thread. That is roughly what a translator sees. It is usually not the vocabulary. It is the sentence that carries three ideas and signals which one matters only through stress.

My thanks to her for the time, and for the reminder that somewhere out there is a reader who will notice everything.