FAQs regarding my translation practice
I often receive requests for interviews from various sources, including from students who are studying my previous work. There are some types of questions which pop up over and over, and for those that come from a particular sort of perspective, it can take some time to pen the answers, because that perspective is rather different from the one that underlies my own practice. Perhaps these answers to Frequently Asked Questions regarding my translation practice will help lay a foundation for answering other more detailed questions. Another resource that goes into more depth is my free ebook Between Two Languages, which can be accessed here.
How do you balance accuracy/faithfulness with elegance?
I think it is important to bear in mind that what the literary translator translates is not words, but the text (story, poem, essay, etc.) as a whole. Accuracy does not exist without the elegance of the literary text, because stripping away the elegance renders it something other than literary. The elegance is an inherent part of the accuracy or faithfulness for which we aim when we do literary translation. It’s not that accuracy/faithfulness are on one end of a line, with elegance being at the pole on the other end. Instead, the elegance is an integral part of the experience of reading the original, and failure to capture that elegance is thus unfaithful/inaccurate. This often – no, not just often, but usually – means that the translator must stray to some degree from literal renderings of the original into the new language, because that sort of “translation” is simply a starting point, not the full work of actually translating the text as a whole. That is like consulting a dictionary for every word in a poem and thus thinking you’ve understood the poem itself. But the words do not make up the meaning of the poem in isolation. Rather, they must all work together to form meaning – and also work within a context of many words that could have appeared in the text but don’t, giving way to those that were chosen instead. A literal rendering of every word in a text is basically the notes a translator uses at the early stages of her work, but it is not in itself a translation. Understanding how those words work together is the next step, and that is followed by fitting the words in the new language together in an equally elegant form so that it says the same thing as the original – not just on the literal level, but on the more impactful levels that elegant language reaches. (This anecdote illustrates my view on this question.)
Why do you translate [insert word or phrase] this way here and a different way there?
The answer to this one is relatively simple: context. In other words, it is an extension to what is said above. A particular word can morph in its meaning or impact based on the words that appear around it. The stubborn translator who continues to render a single word the same way every time, regardless of context, is bound to make embarrassing errors in her work. Faithful translation allows the meaning of the word to be shaped by context, and it renders it accordingly in the new language.
What is the most important skill a translator must have?
There are several key skills a translator needs, including reading well, writing well, keeping to a schedule, communicating effectively with those you work with, communicating effectively what it is that makes a book worth reading (or publishing), and speaking intelligently about the works you have translated or want to translate. All of those are essential skills that can’t be missing from a translator’s toolkit, but I would say that reading well is the foundation on which the entire practice is built.
How did you get started in literary translation?
I am first a reader, a poet, and a writer. My background is in the literary side of my work, with translation coming later in my career. I believe this is the more ideal approach for someone to become a literary translator, rather than starting from translation and trying to add on the literary part. The literary approach to a text is fundamental to literary translation, and it is harder to add it onto the basic skills of translation than it is to add translation skills onto a foundation of good literary practices.
Questions often come up about my work as a “Sinologist.” That’s a point I’d like to clarify.
I am not a Sinologist. Many people refer to me as a Sinologist / 汉学家, or worst of all, a “China watcher,” but those are all the wrong words to use to describe me. My academic background is not in China / Chinese studies, and I do not interact with China / Chinese culture and language at all in the way a Sinologist would. I have very little formal training in Chinese. Most of my language has been picked up through use – conversationally, picked up mainly by ear and by asking questions, and by a few patient friends who helped along the way; reading/writing, almost entirely learned through the help of patient, like-minded friends who have read with me and / or read and corrected my work on a casual basis. The same can be said for my understanding of Chinese culture – I have learned it by living in it, not through formal studies of it, as if it were some object I stand apart from and interact with as an observer. There is nothing further from the actual experience I have had in my interactions with China, Chinese language, and Chinese culture.
So what has my experience with China / Chinese culture and language actually been like? I first came to Singapore as an exchange student when I was 17, followed by a second student trip when I was in university (age 20). I moved to Singapore when I graduated from university at the age of 21, and I have lived there ever since. I began learning to speak Chinese in Singapore simply because there were many people in Singapore who did not speak English back when I moved here, especially my friends’ parents. I felt it rude not to learn to communicate with the people around me in the language they preferred, so I learned. After about 10 years in Singapore, I started traveling back and forth to China, eventually ending up splitting time between Singapore and Shanghai, roughly half the year in each city, up until the pandemic prevented me from re-entering China. At the time of writing (December 2022), I’m still waiting for that situation to change so that I can resume my life of moving freely back and forth between Singapore and Shanghai.
If I’m not a Sinologist, what am I – or rather, what is it that led me to translation? I’m a poet, and I happen to be bilingual. I am interested in all literary pursuits, so it was only natural that I would want to understand Chinese literature too. My formal studies (up through my MA) are in English literature, with a secondary emphasis on cross-cultural communication. My work as a literary translator is led by the first of those two words – literary. My interests are literary, rather than being specifically China-focused or primarily a linguistic exercise. This is how I got into translation, and it has remained my focus, though people have often tried to push me into a box labeled “Sinologist,” or something of that nature. Seeing me as primarily interested in the promotion of either culture – Anglophone or Sinophone – is to misunderstand what I do, though I do promote mutual understanding across the sort of barriers that terms such as Anglophone and Sinophone represent. I am profoundly against the idea of “Othering” those who speak different languages and have different skin colour from oneself, and that plays a part in my interest in translation, but at the end of the day, my primary goal is to create greater opportunities for the sharing of good literature.
I will continue to update these FAQs as more thoughts come to me, but I hope these will be of help for now.
©2022 Shelly Bryant