First of all, we’d like to say it’s an honour to have you on our blog. We have read your book Is that a fish in your ear? and we would like to ask what drove you to write it. It seems to be directed to a wider audience and not to translation professionals in particular. Would you say it’s an attempt to familiarise the public with the translation profession?

You’re quite right: Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is not directed to translation professionals. They don’t need me to tell them what their job is!

The first spark was lit by a pompous, pink-faced parent at a gathering in Princeton, or rather, by his saying, as if he knew what he meant, that ‘translation is no subsitute for the original, of course’. I’ve always been irritated by received wisdom of that kind, but on this occasion the cliché struck me as more than silly—as just plain wrong. So I sat down and wrote a little diatribe. It amused me quite a lot. Then I wrote a few more essays on received wisdom about translation, and soon there emerged the idea for a whole book, initially called “The Truth About Translation”. From the start the aim was to get people who do not often think about translation to realise what sort of a thing it is. It’s a general education book, I suppose. And also an amusing one. Instruire et plaire, that’s always been my aim!

Do you think translators and the profession in general are sometimes underrated and why is that?

Yes, I do think that the profession is little understood and little valued. That is particularly true in the English-speaking world, which has the misfortune to speak the “top” language of the day. Misrecognition of the profession arises from lack of understanding of the nature, history, value and difficulty of the job its practitioners do. That’s what my book is about. But it is also about WHY translation matters, and it’s therefore, in its way, also a book about the nature of language and the nature of human life (or at least, one underlying dimension of it). More.

Read the whole interview in YourTranslator.gr here: http://blog.yourtranslator.gr/interview-month-david-bellos/

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