When a translator translates my book, it is no longer just my book. It is the translator's book, too. So the book in another language is almost the work of two people. And that is quite interesting to me.
The translator has to be a good writer. The translator has to hear music too. And it might not be exactly your music because the translator needs to translate the music. And so, that is what you are hoping for: a translator who gets what you are doing but who also gets all the ways in which it won't work in the new language.
To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
The impresario functions as a bridge and a translator. He or she is a bridge between the creative point of view - which is often very focused on the creative task itself - and the resource-allocation process. The impresario has to make certain the funds and people required to get that task completed are available.
The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.
A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print
It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places...who your translator is can mean a lot.
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
To have the translator be a figure in the book's presentation seems like a big thing, especially for a book that's really popular.
To me a translator is very, very important. If the fixer is also the translator, so much the better. I have known photographers who didn't speak the language and would work in a place for weeks without one, getting by on common sense and smiles. But how many situations did they miss because they couldn't talk to someone and get the back story on details, small daily life things, etc.
In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.
For me, every translation is a new book, with the translator inevitably broadening the meaning of the original book in any translation.
I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.
I think my task is to work with my players, to improve my team. This is my task.
There is, I think, nothing in the world more futile than the attempt to find out how a task should be done when one has not yet decided what the task is.