Michele Hutchison discusses the challenges of editing literary translations with professionals on both sides of this most delicate of processes.

In response to one of my previous blogs, translator Brian Doyle asked whether translators are expected to be editors too. To complicate matters, I asked him about his own recent experiences of editing and this is what he said:

‘My most recent experience of working with editors was for a crime novel – Peter Aspe’s From Bruges With Love. The editing was meticulous and the editors gracious. The translation went through a couple of edits before going to a copyeditor. While I’m sure all – or most – publishers use professional editors, and I’m sure translators need them as much as authors do, my experience has been that the translator is generally left out of the process. How weird would it be if an author submitted his or her manuscript and it appeared in print without further consultation.’

His main bugbear seems to be that publishers don’t always consult translators about changes made to the text. Being edited is also fraught with lots of other issues that make translators feel nervous. Will the editor compare the translation with the original? Will the copyediting shift the text towards a certain notion of proper English without taking into account that the translator may be replicating idiosyncrasies in the original? Is the translator expected to have delivered a perfect text? Should the translator try to improve on the original or not? More.

See: English PEN

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