"I have two reasons for writing this article about that depressed class in the literary metropolis: translators. One is an astonishingly insensitive remark from a widely-read friend (usually appreciative of creativity) who said, “Translators should have the humility to want to stay invisible. Their reward should be their work itself and that sublime feeling should satisfy them...”" The Hindu: Two worlds
I've done very little translation, but I have a great deal of respect for good translators. If I'm reading for leisure, I prefer not to read stuff where the translator isn't translating into his native language. It's usually notably flawed. And even though I translated 2 episodes of Kitchen from Russian to English, it was still flawed, and hard work just to get it to the flawed state. So I respect translators. But this: is bullshit. If he wants to use this idiotic analogy, then it's more like the announcer expecting to get some credit for the win.
Literary translation is an art and a craft. Try translating an Asterix book within engaging your creativity.
There's a nice interview with the woman who translated Asterix into English: How long would it take you and Derek to do a typical album? There is no answer to that. The jokes would sometimes come overnight. You puzzle away thinking of references and allusions - and you’ve got to fit the length of the speech bubbles and it must fit the expressions on the characters’ faces and if there is a pun or an extended passage of wordplay it’s no good doing it literally because then it’s not funny anymore. Some of the later ones by Goscinny have long passages of extended literary allusions. In Le Cadeau de César [Caesar’s Gift] Asterix duels with a Roman soldier and he does it in the character of Cyrano de Bergerac, it’s wonderful, it goes on for almost a page. I sat looking at that and thought “the most famous swordfight in English literature is probably Hamlet and Laertes,” and the whole thing was done with quotations from Hamlet in the end. There's also this page by the man who translated Harry Potter into ancient Greek: Before getting down to the translation I had to find a style - J K Rowling would not lend herself to the style of Thucydides or Plato or Demosthenes (who had been our main models for prose composition). But there are Greek novels (Charitons's Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Cleitophon and Leucippe, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus' African Story) all of whom I read, along with the entire works of Lucian - a most entertaining task. Lucian's humorous tongue-in-cheek approach, together with his fantastical notions such as The True History (which is guaranteed to contain not a single word of truth) soon convinced me that he was the closest writer in ancient Greek to J K R. So Lucian became my model - his Greek, despite his date (3rd century AD) is (almost) pure 5th century BC Attic, which was being recycled at the time. But this also gave me an excuse for using vocabulary from post-classical sources, without which it would have been impossible to proceed. He was also, like me, a Greek through culture and education, not ethnicity. There are some very interesting reviews, including this one: It is, of course, Andrew Wilson's translation, into Ancient Greek, of J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter book. It is also, in this reader's opinion, a complete success. On nearly every page there is some felicity of composition to be admired, some construction that shows off the Greek language's power and versatility, some turn of phrase that arouses admiration for the translator. In its entirety, it is an extraordinary work -- a prose comp. exercise on an unprecedented scale. But unlike most prose comp exercises, it is also a wonderfully good read. And of course, there's Borges, who famously invited his translators to produce better works than his originals (and who himself occasionally "translated" works that never existed, but that's Borges for you). Borges actually collaborated extensively with di Giovanni on English translations of his stories, and offered di Giovanni a 50/50 royalty deal. These are supposedly quite good translations, but unfortunately, they've been aggressively suppressed by Borges estate in favor of translations with where the estate can keep the money. Which is pity for many reasons, including the fact that these stories are actually lost works by Borges himself, thanks to his high level of English and his extensive collaboration with the translator. I'm also quite fond of an obscure book titled The Gist. This contains three copies of a short story: the original English version, a French translation, and then a second translation back to English without access to the original. It's fascinating watching how the story changes with each translation: each translator struggles to keep both the literal meaning and the style, but all too often, one or the other must be sacrificed. Most translations, in my personal experience, seem somehow "flatter" than the original, and any stylistic charm is blunted. English translations of De la démocratie en Amérique tend to flatten Tocqueville's tightly crafted prose into something that sounds like a third-rate imitation of Lincoln (and I don't blame the translators, either). In the other direction, the French translation of the science-fiction classic Dune loses much of the charm of Herbert's carefully-chosen language. If you believe that word choice matters, and if you appreciate style, then a good translation can feel almost like a miracle. Translation is certainly an odd literary form—sort of like recomposing a work using nothing but synonyms—but it demands great talent and artistry, even if the translator's goal is to remain invisible. And for some works, such as Asterix, the entire idea of an invisible translator is somewhat laughable.
