Thursday, 19 July 2012
Back!
I am back! I spent the past three and a half weeks eschewing adult company, only reading recipes online and moving house.
Monday, 25 June 2012
Friday, 22 June 2012
On Loving
Last weekend saw the annual German literary translators' get-together, as I mentioned previously. And one of the features is an evening event at which translators read from their work on a selection of themes. I unleashed my inner diva and read a short story by Clemens Meyer, "A Ship Will Come", from my translation of his collection All the Lights.
Partly, it was a fantastic ego-massage exercise. Some Germans have a tendency to read in a slightly monotonous manner, so if you raise and lower your voice and speed up and slow down and do the kind of thing you'd generally do when reading a bedtime story, German audiences can be very impressed. And the atmosphere among literary translators, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, is terribly supportive and appreciative - possibly because we don't see each other very often - so people did actually come up to me over the weekend and tell me how much they enjoyed it. Which was wonderful. Thanks everyone!
But one major reason why I enjoyed it and the audience did too is that the story's just so damn good. I really, really love that story. I won't tell you much about it because obviously I want you to buy the book and enjoy it for yourself, but it leaves a lot open to interpretation and it gets you almost as confused as its protagonist. I love the way Clemens Meyer does that to his readers, it's a real art.
Later in the weekend there was a panel discussion between the writer Katharina Hagena and her English and Norwegian translators, Jamie Bulloch and Elisabeth Hallvorsen. The chair Gregor Dotzauer asked about the differences between writing and translating, suggesting that writers put more of themselves into the process. Now that may or may not be the case, but it made me think of something else.
One huge benefit we translators have - if we're lucky - is that we're free to adore the writing we work on. I imagine that most writers are never fully satisfied with their writing, similarly to the way most translators are never fully satisfied with our translations. But while I do feel that frustration, at the same time I can marvel at what someone else has put into words. And I can say, "Yes, I genuinely love this story!" I don't know, maybe I'm the only person who feels that way, but it gives me the conviction to present the writing I've translated with enthusiasm and - yes, absolutely - with love. I hope that comes across.
Partly, it was a fantastic ego-massage exercise. Some Germans have a tendency to read in a slightly monotonous manner, so if you raise and lower your voice and speed up and slow down and do the kind of thing you'd generally do when reading a bedtime story, German audiences can be very impressed. And the atmosphere among literary translators, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, is terribly supportive and appreciative - possibly because we don't see each other very often - so people did actually come up to me over the weekend and tell me how much they enjoyed it. Which was wonderful. Thanks everyone!
But one major reason why I enjoyed it and the audience did too is that the story's just so damn good. I really, really love that story. I won't tell you much about it because obviously I want you to buy the book and enjoy it for yourself, but it leaves a lot open to interpretation and it gets you almost as confused as its protagonist. I love the way Clemens Meyer does that to his readers, it's a real art.
Later in the weekend there was a panel discussion between the writer Katharina Hagena and her English and Norwegian translators, Jamie Bulloch and Elisabeth Hallvorsen. The chair Gregor Dotzauer asked about the differences between writing and translating, suggesting that writers put more of themselves into the process. Now that may or may not be the case, but it made me think of something else.
One huge benefit we translators have - if we're lucky - is that we're free to adore the writing we work on. I imagine that most writers are never fully satisfied with their writing, similarly to the way most translators are never fully satisfied with our translations. But while I do feel that frustration, at the same time I can marvel at what someone else has put into words. And I can say, "Yes, I genuinely love this story!" I don't know, maybe I'm the only person who feels that way, but it gives me the conviction to present the writing I've translated with enthusiasm and - yes, absolutely - with love. I hope that comes across.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Fame at Last
I am now officially famous. Read about my reading adventures and passions at Shelf Awareness, if you will.
Monday, 18 June 2012
More on Self-Translation
...as defined previously, as in publishers having their own books translated into English and then putting them on the eBook market from afar...
Cologne-based publishers Lübbe have started doing just that with a serialized "webnovel" called Apocalypsis, written by Mario Giordano. You can download installments in English via Amazon or iTunes. Unfortunately I don't have the right device, which meant I had to ask someone to do me a favour. The reason being that I was interested in who translated it but the translator's name isn't given on either of those two pages, nor in any of the publicity material I found. That's unusual - most German translation contracts stipulate that the translator must be named in publicity material.
But she is named in the eBook itself: Diana Beate Hellmann, Los Angeles. She's an experienced translator, albeit in the other direction. But they also name the English editor so I assume the translation is of decent quality. Aside from the translator invisibility issue, if you're going to do the job yourself then this is the way to do it.
According to this PR text, the book "contains a captivating blend of text, illustrations, video, audio, and interactive enhanced elements". Apparently, "what starts out as a sophisticated Vatican conspiracy, soon develops into a uniquely intense and spectacular thriller. Pope John Paul III has disappeared without a trace. The whole world is searching for him, including journalist Peter Adam. What he finds out exceeds the bounds of human imagination: evidence that the church is on the brink of doom and so is the world…."
Oh my. It's certainly an interesting experiment, and was launched with a bit of a bang at Hay Festival on 8 June, although not so much of a bang that I noticed it over here. And I love the way the protagonist has a totally international name - he could be German or Australian or Dutch or South African, for all we know so far.
Amazon.com puts episode 1 at "#107,624 Paid in Kindle Store", compared to "#1.054 Bezahlt in Kindle-Shop" for the same episode in German on Amazon.de. It's a bit too early to pass judgement, admittedly, but perhaps that demand issue I raised previously might be coming into play... But then of course I have to say that to prove my pessimistic point. I certainly wish them the best of success!
Cologne-based publishers Lübbe have started doing just that with a serialized "webnovel" called Apocalypsis, written by Mario Giordano. You can download installments in English via Amazon or iTunes. Unfortunately I don't have the right device, which meant I had to ask someone to do me a favour. The reason being that I was interested in who translated it but the translator's name isn't given on either of those two pages, nor in any of the publicity material I found. That's unusual - most German translation contracts stipulate that the translator must be named in publicity material.
But she is named in the eBook itself: Diana Beate Hellmann, Los Angeles. She's an experienced translator, albeit in the other direction. But they also name the English editor so I assume the translation is of decent quality. Aside from the translator invisibility issue, if you're going to do the job yourself then this is the way to do it.
According to this PR text, the book "contains a captivating blend of text, illustrations, video, audio, and interactive enhanced elements". Apparently, "what starts out as a sophisticated Vatican conspiracy, soon develops into a uniquely intense and spectacular thriller. Pope John Paul III has disappeared without a trace. The whole world is searching for him, including journalist Peter Adam. What he finds out exceeds the bounds of human imagination: evidence that the church is on the brink of doom and so is the world…."
Oh my. It's certainly an interesting experiment, and was launched with a bit of a bang at Hay Festival on 8 June, although not so much of a bang that I noticed it over here. And I love the way the protagonist has a totally international name - he could be German or Australian or Dutch or South African, for all we know so far.
Amazon.com puts episode 1 at "#107,624 Paid in Kindle Store", compared to "#1.054 Bezahlt in Kindle-Shop" for the same episode in German on Amazon.de. It's a bit too early to pass judgement, admittedly, but perhaps that demand issue I raised previously might be coming into play... But then of course I have to say that to prove my pessimistic point. I certainly wish them the best of success!
Thursday, 14 June 2012
Where Are the Women in Translation?
Today Stefan Tobler of the top exciting British mainly-translation publishers And Other Stories tweeted that he thought "more men than women submit literary fiction. We'd love that to change! Submissions info here.... http://fb.me/1BlefTKIL"
So if you're a woman writer and think your work would work for them, do submit.
But I was thinking about why it is that more men than women get translated into English. It's definitely the case; I just called up the most recent translation database compiled by Three Percent, in this case listing first translations into English in 2011. In a strictly scientific experiment, I went down all the first names of the translated authors and highlighted the ones I thought were probably women. Then I highlighted about half of the ones where I had no idea whether they were men or women, just to be on the safe side. I made it about 80ish women authors out of 360 translated titles. The list remained really rather white - even if I'm rubbish at sexing names, we can still assume women writers accounted for only a quarter to a third of translated titles last year. Next I went down the list of translators' first names doing the same. Too many women to count, I'd say roughly half - it looked quite yellow.
Why on earth could it be? A friend of mine once suggested translators aren't averse to picking authors by how attractive they find them. I decided to neglect this theory because it would involve too much speculation on the statistical sexuality of translators, and anyway it's not usually the translators who choose what gets published in book form. Although it might be an interesting topic for a survey of translators who submit to literary magazines. Anyone?
So I have three other vague and speculative theories. Firstly, many successful women writers write genre fiction, and less genre fiction gets translated into English. Just as an example, this piece about historical fiction in Germany says about two thirds of the writers published last season are women.
And secondly there's that thing about men being more prominent in female-dominated fields. Because publishing's basically run by women (except for the upper echelons, d'oh!), fiction's basically read by women and there are more women writing than men. So the smaller number of men rise to prominence more easily than, say, in the world of investment banking, and certainly more quickly than women tend to. There's been research on this - they call it the glass elevator effect. Or maybe men have retained their privileged position from the times when publishing and writing was still male-dominated and have only let women get into the runner-up positions. Or maybe all those heterosexual women readers are buying books based on the author photo on the back. Or all the heterosexual women editors are buying translation rights based on the author photo on the back. Or the men on the awards committees are handing out prizes to their peers and buddies. Whatever the case, very many of the big guns of international fiction are men, and it's the big earners, the big award winners and the big guns who get translated into English.
Thirdly, because a lot of canonical writers get translated and re-translated, there are still plenty of dead white men to be dealt with - although this isn't reflected as strongly as it might be in the Three Percent statistics because they don't include re-translations.
I'm not sure what can be done to get more women writers into English, other than raising awareness. But on a very low level, our AOS German-language reading group is especially reading three books by women with the aim of suggesting one of them for translation. Bucking the trend slightly, I count I've translated seven women and two men so far, with two more men on my to-do list.
So if you're a woman writer and think your work would work for them, do submit.
But I was thinking about why it is that more men than women get translated into English. It's definitely the case; I just called up the most recent translation database compiled by Three Percent, in this case listing first translations into English in 2011. In a strictly scientific experiment, I went down all the first names of the translated authors and highlighted the ones I thought were probably women. Then I highlighted about half of the ones where I had no idea whether they were men or women, just to be on the safe side. I made it about 80ish women authors out of 360 translated titles. The list remained really rather white - even if I'm rubbish at sexing names, we can still assume women writers accounted for only a quarter to a third of translated titles last year. Next I went down the list of translators' first names doing the same. Too many women to count, I'd say roughly half - it looked quite yellow.
Why on earth could it be? A friend of mine once suggested translators aren't averse to picking authors by how attractive they find them. I decided to neglect this theory because it would involve too much speculation on the statistical sexuality of translators, and anyway it's not usually the translators who choose what gets published in book form. Although it might be an interesting topic for a survey of translators who submit to literary magazines. Anyone?
So I have three other vague and speculative theories. Firstly, many successful women writers write genre fiction, and less genre fiction gets translated into English. Just as an example, this piece about historical fiction in Germany says about two thirds of the writers published last season are women.
And secondly there's that thing about men being more prominent in female-dominated fields. Because publishing's basically run by women (except for the upper echelons, d'oh!), fiction's basically read by women and there are more women writing than men. So the smaller number of men rise to prominence more easily than, say, in the world of investment banking, and certainly more quickly than women tend to. There's been research on this - they call it the glass elevator effect. Or maybe men have retained their privileged position from the times when publishing and writing was still male-dominated and have only let women get into the runner-up positions. Or maybe all those heterosexual women readers are buying books based on the author photo on the back. Or all the heterosexual women editors are buying translation rights based on the author photo on the back. Or the men on the awards committees are handing out prizes to their peers and buddies. Whatever the case, very many of the big guns of international fiction are men, and it's the big earners, the big award winners and the big guns who get translated into English.
Thirdly, because a lot of canonical writers get translated and re-translated, there are still plenty of dead white men to be dealt with - although this isn't reflected as strongly as it might be in the Three Percent statistics because they don't include re-translations.
I'm not sure what can be done to get more women writers into English, other than raising awareness. But on a very low level, our AOS German-language reading group is especially reading three books by women with the aim of suggesting one of them for translation. Bucking the trend slightly, I count I've translated seven women and two men so far, with two more men on my to-do list.
Is Self-Translation the Future?
Benjamin Stein just reminded me of a speculative piece by Tom Hillenbrand (whose name I have to check every time I type it, sorry) about the future of publishing. Hillenbrand gives us ten bold theses on ebooks (in German), nine of which I won't go into.
However, point 10 is pretty damn fascinating for me, and prompted me to make a facetious comment when the piece was co-opted to a trade mag, which I rather regret now. Hillenbrand's thesis is that German (for the sake of simplicity, let's stick to just German) publishers or writers will start publishing their own English editions in Germany. He says the model in which a British or American publisher buys the English translation rights and then takes care of the translation and marketing will be passé in a fully digitalized market of the future.
To my mind, Hillenbrand has neglected one all-important factor in his calculation: the translator. While we are training up professional literary translators in the UK and the US now via degree courses and other programmes, there are still never going to be enough to meet demand should every author start "self-translating", as I'd like to call it, analogue to self-publishing. Simply because of the fact that English-speakers no longer feel any great need to learn foreign languages. (As a brief aside: read Tim Parks' latest column for the NYRB blog for a look at how favoured English-language fiction is on European markets. I may come back to this later.) Under these conditions, into-English translations would be a sellers' market and the price would presumably rocket up, well above Hillenbrand's already underestimated "couple of thousand euro". The supply side would be very tricky indeed.
Secondly, we have the issue of quality and quality control. It's not a new argument that publishers provide these services, which are not guaranteed in self-publishing. British and American publishers have contacts to translators and are in a position to judge the quality of their work, and to edit it specifically for their market. What does happen already is that German publishers commission occasional translations of non-fiction titles, often on popular historical subjects (i.e. Nazis), which they do market themselves inside Germany, to tourists. However, the translation quality is hit-and-miss and the editing process is difficult, let's say, because the books' original editors aren't in a position to judge the translation quality and have to rely on freelance native-speaker editors whose work they usually don't know either.
Moot point number three is demand. There's already very low demand for translated fiction in English-speaking countries, for whatever reasons. Now I don't pretend that UK/US publishers have unquestionable taste, but at the moment it's them who guess at what might drum up some demand among English-speaking readers. In my modest experience of German publishers' ideas of what might go down well in the UK/US, I'd say they're not always terribly good judges. And if we ask the authors themselves, well. We all have ego issues. With the way things are going, I don't see demand increasing sufficiently for it to be worthwhile investing - let's say - €10,000 (for translating, editing and typesetting a short book) on the off chance.
Benjamin also raised the point of German publishers lacking knowledge of the UK/US market with regard to taste in cover design, marketing, etc. I think that's a very good point, although Hillenbrand seems to be arguing that there won't be much need for those aspects in his publishing u-/dystopia.
So while I suspect self-translation will indeed happen more often in the future as it gets easier to produce books in digital-only form, I don't agree that everybody will jump on the bandwagon. Certainly I wouldn't recommend it, although if the idea were to take off, the quality glitch at least might be ironed out over time. What I find fascinating is the way Hillenbrand's thesis is almost diametrically opposed to Parks' idea of Anglo-American fiction's dominance and its effects on European reading (and writing) habits. At the risk of getting facetious again, under the present circumstances self-translation would be pretty much a vanity project, and an expensive one at that.
Update: As this brief item in German trade mag Buchreport reveals, it turns out that some publishers are already involved in self-translation. More soon.
Update update: Here's the more.
However, point 10 is pretty damn fascinating for me, and prompted me to make a facetious comment when the piece was co-opted to a trade mag, which I rather regret now. Hillenbrand's thesis is that German (for the sake of simplicity, let's stick to just German) publishers or writers will start publishing their own English editions in Germany. He says the model in which a British or American publisher buys the English translation rights and then takes care of the translation and marketing will be passé in a fully digitalized market of the future.
The market entry costs are now negligible; no one is stopping the German publisher (or the author himself) from translating a book themselves and marketing it worldwide via iTunes and Amazon.com.
Even for a title that doesn't seem to have great potential for the English-language market, it will still make sense to put a translation onto the market on the off chance. The Anglo-Saxon market is gigantic and nobody really knows anyway why certain books are successful.
A translation only costs a couple of thousand euro, putting the digital book on Amazon is free and then the title is accessible for half a billion readers. It's cheap, it's high-potential and so everyone will do it.I started discussing the point with Benjamin and soon realized I couldn't do so either in German or via a comments section. So I'd like to go into it in more detail here, with particular reference to my field, which is translating fiction.
To my mind, Hillenbrand has neglected one all-important factor in his calculation: the translator. While we are training up professional literary translators in the UK and the US now via degree courses and other programmes, there are still never going to be enough to meet demand should every author start "self-translating", as I'd like to call it, analogue to self-publishing. Simply because of the fact that English-speakers no longer feel any great need to learn foreign languages. (As a brief aside: read Tim Parks' latest column for the NYRB blog for a look at how favoured English-language fiction is on European markets. I may come back to this later.) Under these conditions, into-English translations would be a sellers' market and the price would presumably rocket up, well above Hillenbrand's already underestimated "couple of thousand euro". The supply side would be very tricky indeed.
Secondly, we have the issue of quality and quality control. It's not a new argument that publishers provide these services, which are not guaranteed in self-publishing. British and American publishers have contacts to translators and are in a position to judge the quality of their work, and to edit it specifically for their market. What does happen already is that German publishers commission occasional translations of non-fiction titles, often on popular historical subjects (i.e. Nazis), which they do market themselves inside Germany, to tourists. However, the translation quality is hit-and-miss and the editing process is difficult, let's say, because the books' original editors aren't in a position to judge the translation quality and have to rely on freelance native-speaker editors whose work they usually don't know either.
Moot point number three is demand. There's already very low demand for translated fiction in English-speaking countries, for whatever reasons. Now I don't pretend that UK/US publishers have unquestionable taste, but at the moment it's them who guess at what might drum up some demand among English-speaking readers. In my modest experience of German publishers' ideas of what might go down well in the UK/US, I'd say they're not always terribly good judges. And if we ask the authors themselves, well. We all have ego issues. With the way things are going, I don't see demand increasing sufficiently for it to be worthwhile investing - let's say - €10,000 (for translating, editing and typesetting a short book) on the off chance.
Benjamin also raised the point of German publishers lacking knowledge of the UK/US market with regard to taste in cover design, marketing, etc. I think that's a very good point, although Hillenbrand seems to be arguing that there won't be much need for those aspects in his publishing u-/dystopia.
So while I suspect self-translation will indeed happen more often in the future as it gets easier to produce books in digital-only form, I don't agree that everybody will jump on the bandwagon. Certainly I wouldn't recommend it, although if the idea were to take off, the quality glitch at least might be ironed out over time. What I find fascinating is the way Hillenbrand's thesis is almost diametrically opposed to Parks' idea of Anglo-American fiction's dominance and its effects on European reading (and writing) habits. At the risk of getting facetious again, under the present circumstances self-translation would be pretty much a vanity project, and an expensive one at that.
Update: As this brief item in German trade mag Buchreport reveals, it turns out that some publishers are already involved in self-translation. More soon.
Update update: Here's the more.
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