If you've been following this blog for a while, you must have noticed that this year there has been no interview to celebrate Translation Day, Saint Jerome's Day. Neither for translators of various languages nor for translators of Chinese. And the thing is, 2020 has been, to put it mildly, a shitty year, and I didn't feel like preparing an interview. That's the beauty of amateur blogs: you do what you want and when you want, and if you don't want to, you don't do it. 🙂
And then I thought… “Shut up! This year we’re going to do it differently: we’re going to talk about NON-literary translators.” In fact, there are more of us. In fact, you need us in your day-to-day life. In fact, our work is a basic necessity. We don’t have the glamour of literary translators, but I swear that if the leaflet for a medicine isn’t translated well, you can have soooo many more problems than if you can’t read a book by that Thai author you like so much.
So, I thought I would talk about non-literary translators and give a brief reminder of the interviews with literary translators I have already done. I find them very interesting because, if you evaluate them as a whole, you will see a diversity of profiles that you might not have expected. I will start with the Chinese translation side, with a poker of translators who work magnificently well and who have been brought to us by authors like Sanmao or my very revered Yan Lianke:
On the other hand, we also have interviews with translators of other languages, and you've probably seen the blog post a review of one of the books they've translated. Here too, there are diverse profiles, from people who dedicate themselves solely to translating to those who are also poets or authors, or those who combine translation with teaching:
- Yannick Garcia Porres
- Anna Llisterri Boix
- Jordi Mas Lopez
- Ferran Rafols Gesa
- Maria Rosich Andreu
- Meritxell Salvany Ballad
And now let's talk about those whose names are not on the cover, nor will we have them (nor do we need to have them).
Long live NON-literary translators!
Now you can throw all the (virtual) rocks at me that you want, but sometimes I feel a little fed up with the complaints from the world of literary translation. Yes, I understand that they are demanding their rights (and they are doing a good job!), but they could also remember those of us who type on a daily basis and make many everyday activities possible.
I'll give you a list of some of the things we translate (I don't do them all) so you can get an idea of the magnitude of the "tragedy" (relative, I know).
- Video games: from simple Comecocos messages to things as complex as Clash of Clans or Fortnite.
- Appliance manuals and other technical documents: it is important to know that program 1 of the washing machine sets the water to 100 degrees so as not to shrink that Mohair sweater that you love so much.
- Various contracts: it is vital that the salary and conditions are well translated, or the conditions of the mortgage, or...
- Movies and series: the audiovisual world is super complex! And we want James Bond to drink his martinis stirred, not shaken (or was it the other way around?).
- Advertising: radio ads, TV ads, posters you see on the street... advertising can be misleading enough in itself, as to not translate the message well!!
- Judicial processes and administrative procedures: from statements to the police to any kind of sentence; sometimes, the translator even has to swear and perjure that the translation is faithful to the original, and for this you need to be a sworn translator.
- Online websites and platforms: you've probably bought online at Amazon, or Zalando, or FNAC, or Decathlon or Abacus... well, yes, we, the invisible ones, translate all of this! And also media websites, official entities such as the Generalitat or the Treasury...
And many many other things that I can't think of right now. Yes, we are also supposed to translate the IKEA catalog and posters, but honestly I don't know who the hell does it because the errors they accumulate (and that I have notified them many times by fax -years ago- and by email) are not even machine translation errors. Don't blame us, there is someone out there who wants us bad!!!!
As you can see, the degree of invisibility of the translator is inversely proportional to the lives it helps : have you ever thought about who the hell translates Fornite or Brawl Stars? If you don't know what they are, think of the translators of the introductions to the use of any medication, such as, I don't know... Viagra???. You will surely see that we play a very important role in the day to day of many people.
Boom!
Oh, that's it, I've done the rounds, as a friend of mine says. After saying everything that was going through my head, I'm at peace with myself again and I will continue to worship my favorite literary translators (I have a few!) and demand that they be visible. In a way, they also represent us, the rest of us.
Well, you'll forgive me because I think I've left a strange and somewhat chaotic entry, and at some points it also has a touch of a bit of a fake Musa (I'm terrible). If so, I think it's a good summary of the year of the Lord 2020: a very explosive year that is not over yet. Yesterday, for example, we were brought a case from the movies, the attempted assassination of Josep M. Mainat at the hands of his wife, and I woke up with the news that Donald Trump and his wife have the virus. At this rate, I'm curious to see how the year will end!
In the meantime, read books… and think about translators, too, when you read shampoo labels. 😀