We asked an award-winning author and his translator what it’s like to translate a best-seller from Spanish to English.

FERNWEH. FORELSKET. WABI-SABI. Words that don’t have a direct translation into English, but which we really wish did.

The joy of languages is that for all the similarities you can find between some of them (like Celtic languages such as Irish and Welsh, or Swedish and Danish), it’s the differences that can be most interesting.

The cliché that Inuits have 50 words for snow is apparently true, while some words that can’t be translated into English, like schadenfreude, have been adopted by English speakers.

Then there are words like fernweh (German for ‘feeling homesick for a place you have never been to’) and mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, meaning ‘a wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start’), that would be very satisfying to sneak into conversation.

But for all the fun you can have with trying to use these words in everyday chats, think of the translators whose job it is to bring best-selling novels from one language to another.

What happens when a word simply doesn’t exist, or a sentence doesn’t quite make sense once translated?

Translating a novel

The author Juan Gabriel Vásquez is no stranger to translation. He’s a translator himself, having brought works by Victor Hugo and EM Forster from English to Spanish. He’s also an award-winning novelist who has just won the IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award.

While sitting down to chat about the award in Dublin earlier this week, Vásquez was joined by Anne McClean, the award-winning translator of his books. She’s the woman who translated his Los Informantes into The Informants, and worked her magic on The Sound of Things Falling.

The latter won this year’s IMPAC award, and saw Vásquez receiving €75,000 of the prize and McClean €25,000.

Perhaps the reason the duo work so well together is that they both understand the process of translation.

Vásquez described it as “a fascinating process with Anne”. If we talk about the language in books in percentages, he said, “the percentage of English language in my books is very high, so this is a book built in part on the shoulders of The Great Gatsby, or A Good Soldier, or Philip Roth’s novels.” More.

See: TheJournal.ie

Related Translation News article:

• Juan Gabriel Vásquez wins International Impac Dublin Literary Award

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