Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

There is a difference between translating jokes and translating style, however. The first is typically done by concentrated effort; the second is better done by taking a slight distance from the text and allowing its underlying patterns to emerge by their own force in the process of rewriting in a second tongue. What they have in common is this: finding a match for a joke and a match for a style are both instances of a more general ability that may best be called a pattern-matching skill.

We’re still short of an answer to the question of what we mean by “match,” but we’re getting closer.

TWENTY-SEVEN Translating Literary Texts

In the English-speaking world, there are no job postings for literary translators and few openings for beginners. Insofar as it is remunerated at all, literary translation is paid at piece rates equivalent to a babysitter’s hourly charge. It is pursued mainly by people who have other sources of income to pay the rent and the grocer. There are a few exceptions, but literary translation into English is for the most part done by amateurs.

Yet it plays a central part in the international circulation of new literary work. The disparity between global role and local recognition is perhaps the greatest curiosity of the whole trade. Literary translation into any language has features that mark it off from most other kinds of language work. To begin with, it usually has liberal time constraints compared with work in commercial, legal, or technical fields. It also engages the translator’s responsibility in less daunting ways. Translation mistakes in court, in hospitals, and in maintenance manuals may cause immediate harm to others. Making a mess of a masterpiece certainly has consequences, but they don’t threaten the translator or the client in comparable ways. Producing fluent prose to stand in place of a story told in German or Spanish is also more entertaining than writing an English-language summary of a Russian document on border issues in the Barents Sea. All these things make sense of the fact that the rewriters of foreign novels in English translation have low pay and low profiles. They don’t have too hard a time.

It could hardly be more different in Japan. Motoyuki Shibata is without question the most famous translator from English in the country: his publisher puts out the Motoyuki Shibata Translation Collection, and bookshops set aside whole sections for it. His name does not just appear on the dust jacket but is printed in the same type size as the author’s name.

Japanese literary translators have much the same status as authors do in Britain and America. Many author-translators are household names, and there’s even a celebrity-gossip book about them: Honyakuka Retsuden 101, “The Lives of the Translators 101.”

Many other countries give translators greater symbolic and material rewards than America or Britain. In Germany, literary translators are usually granted a significant royalty on the books they translate; French literary translators, too, are better paid than their American counterparts. In the English-speaking world, almost all literary translators have a day job to support their avocation, but in France, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere you can use translating as your day job to finance a second calling—such as writing fiction of your own.

These discrepancies in the social and economic context of literary translation among the Far East, Continental Europe, and the anglophone world reflect the asymmetry in the global flow of translations. The situational contexts of literary translation are so different when translating UP and translating DOWN—toward the center, or toward the periphery, in Pascale Casanova’s terms[165]—that they cannot fail to have broad effects on the way the task is done.

In cultures that lie on the periphery of the global circulation of literary works, what is wanted is access to the center. The cultural standing of literary works in translation is determined in the first place by the simple fact that they give access to the foreign. In central languages, on the other hand, the foreignness of a new book is of no special importance. New writing from abroad has to win its place in the culture by other means. But as there is only one central language at the moment, the gulf in translation practice lies between English and the rest.