The Art and Business of Literary Translation with Dr. B.J. Woodstein

Dr. B.J. Woodstein, Professor, Translator, and Writer, joins SlatorPod to talk about translation theory and its implications for literary translators, while also shedding light on the professional challenges, nuances, and ethical considerations.

B.J. discusses her upcoming book, “Translation Theory for Literary Translators”, where she aims to demystify translation theory and make it accessible to translators. She highlights the need for translators to understand and engage with translation theory to enhance their work and make informed decisions in their practice.

The author shares insights on the market dynamics of literary translation, including how translators are selected, rates are set, and the challenges faced in the industry. 

She highlights the importance of human intervention in translation, especially in handling linguistic nuances, cultural concepts, and editorial decisions that go beyond what AI or machine translation can achieve.

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B.J. reflects on the linguistic and cultural challenges in translating from Swedish to English, such as dealing with different language structures and cultural nuances that may not easily be translated. She also explores the complexities of translating sensitive or explicit content, where decisions need to be made to maintain cultural authenticity while adapting for the target market.

The podcast concludes with B.J. sharing her current research projects on equality, diversity, and inclusion in higher education, as well as her interest in translating queer literature.

Transcript

Florian: Welcome everyone to SlatorPod. Today on the podcast, we welcome Dr. B.J. Woodstein. Dr. Woodstein is a translator, writer, and an honorary professor in literature and translation at the University of East Anglia. She’s also the author of the upcoming book Translation Theory for Literary Translators. Tell us a bit more about your academic background, translation background, translation theory background, and what drew your interest, particularly to literary translation.

B.J.: My very brief story is that I grew up in the United States, in Chicago, and suddenly found myself living in Sweden rather randomly when I was in my early 20s, and I hadn’t learned Swedish. I had studied Latin and Spanish at school, needed to learn Swedish, and I found myself falling in love with Swedish as a language and Swedish literature. I started thinking, actually, the way you write in Swedish is rather different from how you write in English. Really obvious thought. Swedish literature is different from English literature. I wonder why that is? That set me off on this path of wanting to learn more as an academic. At the same time, I was meeting people who were saying things to me like, oh, you’re a native English speaker. I have my website or my restaurant’s menu or my whatever in Swedish. Could you translate it for me? And I thought, yeah, sure. How hard can that be? In my ignorance and naivety. And I gradually became a little bit better at translation, and I became a translator, and so I think I started translating in 2002. That’s quite a long time ago now and my career just progressed since then. I moved to the UK to do my PhD, which was in a field called translation studies. Then I spent many years in academia, and I left full-time academia in August, this past August, and I’m combining research with translation and writing now.

Florian: Very interesting. So in the initial part of your career, it was probably not literary translation, mostly it was business translation?

B.J.: It was. I did everything because I realized that I learned so much from every job that I worked on. I know that now we talk a lot about how you should specialize in a field and stick with that and maybe go with pharmaceuticals and learn a lot about medicine or whatever. But in the early stages, if somebody offered me a job, I said, yes, figuring I would learn it as I went along. I found myself, at one point, I was translating an academic article all about astronomy, not a subject I’ve ever studied. Another time, I was translating a user’s manual for a very fancy stapler. Another time, I was doing something for financial reports. I was all over the place in what I was doing, and I found it really exciting. Also, I realized that there are some types of translation that I’m probably not really suited to. That was a good learning experience, too.

Florian: Good thing we just got Google back in those days, 2001, 2002, I remember. It’s like, okay, how would I have done this before Google? When I talk to the translators who were maybe 10 years older, they were like, oh, what are you doing? Yeah, I’m using Google.

B.J.: You mentioned the older translators you knew, and I found that they were such a good resource because they would say, oh, I’ve got too much work. Would you like to do something for me and I’ll give you some feedback on it? I learned a lot from them, and I really appreciated the solidarity in the community of translators associations. That has been really brilliant for me.

Florian: Now you have a book coming out soon, The Translation Theory for Literary Translators. Let’s start with a few questions. Maybe the first one, what’s the book about? Expand on the title and why write the book?

B.J.: In my job, when I was teaching at the university, I wanted to introduce my translation students to translation theory. Many of the students came and had this idea, well, I’m going to come do this Master’s program in translation, and then I’m going to be a full-time translator of poetry, or whatever it was that was their passion or something. I had this difficult job of saying, I love your enthusiasm, but most of us don’t make a living like that. You’re going to need to do different kinds of translation. You’re going to have to try out different kinds of translation. You’re going to have to learn about translation as a field. To me, part of that was studying translation theory. For many of my students, they were really frightened of that. They said, no, this is too difficult. I didn’t come here to do theory. I came for the practice of translation. I had this job to do of trying to get them enthusiastic about translation theory and to realize why it was beneficial for the work that they were doing as translators. I tried to also demystify it because there’s this concept or this belief that translation theory is so heavy going. Sure, some of it is. All kinds of theory is pretty heavy going. But actually, when you get into it, the ideas aren’t quite as complicated as you might think, and they’re really worth discussing. I’d been teaching like that for, I don’t know, a dozen years or something, and I realized that there was no accessible book on the market about translation theory aimed at translators. There are lots of books on translation theory, of course, but I wanted to make something available so that people could see, oh, these are really interesting ideas. They’re worth me thinking about and talking about, and they’re not that disconnected from my practice as a translator.

Florian: It’s fascinating. It’s more of an overview. It’s not like you elaborating on your particular theory, right? You’re giving a broad overview of some of the key theories that are out there. Because I remember, it’s two decades ago, but having to go through some of these theoretical approaches and reading them. It was hard. It was very technical and dense, I guess. Again, sorry, the question would be like, you’re providing an overview, so people maybe want to dig deeper if they want to.

B.J.: Absolutely. I will refer to some of the greatest hits of theory that you might read about, but I’m also trying to highlight ones that maybe are lesser known. I mean, for me, personally, it was really important to look at theories from different countries as well, because when we talk about translation theory, people often think of it as something really Western. Usually it’s male. I wanted to say, actually, people have been thinking about, theorizing about translation for centuries. Here are some interesting ideas from India. Here are some ideas from Israel. Here’s some stuff going on in this country or that country and this ethnicity and that ethnicity. To show that actually it’s not just this kind of Western concept. It’s a combination of an overview, but also with a few deep dives into look, this is how they view translation in Greece, for example.

Florian: Very interesting. Are you still translating at this point?

B.J.: I am, yes, I do. I still translate a lot.

Florian: How does does the theory influence your day-to-day? Or have you absorbed it so deeply that it’s automatic at this point?

B.J.: If I’m translating a text, I don’t sit there and go, Gosh, what would Saint Jerome say about it? What would this person? I don’t do that at all. What I do is I think, okay, what am I trying to achieve here? What are other things that I’ve thought about or read about in my career as a translator that might be helpful in terms of carrying out this translation? One of the things that I happen to be really interested in is the issue of ethics. How do our ethical responsibilities as translators influence the choices we make while we’re translating? A really obvious example would be children’s literature. I do a lot of children’s literature. I happen to really love children’s books. I have young children, and I make them read my translation so I can get their feedback on it as real children responding to literature, which they do actually enjoy, as harsh as that sounded in some ways. I make them read my book. But anyway, so you’re doing children’s literature, and I’ve realized that in different cultures, people have very different views about what is appropriate for children in terms of subject matter and how you write about it, and also how you illustrate it, if you’re talking about an illustrated book. I’m sitting there thinking, okay, well, if I’m translating from Swedish, this was acceptable in Sweden, what will my target audience in Canada or the United States or the UK or wherever, what are they going to think about it? What are the publishers going to be expecting me to do? You could say the people who hold the purse strings, so the parents, what is it that they’re looking for? I might go back to ideas about ethics from translation theory to think about, okay, should I take this job? If I do take this job, are there changes that need to be made? If I don’t think so, but the editor does, how much am I going to go to bat for this particular book or this particular issue within the book? How much am I going to involve the author in it? There are a lot of questions. I guess I feel that translation theory is one tool in my toolbox, and I’ve got lots and lots of tools as a translator. You mentioned Google before, and Google is another tool that we’ve got as translators.

Florian: How big is the difference between, let’s stay with the children’s literature, how big the delta, as it were, between Swedish and the very broader English global culture? Because I’m asking because my kids love Astrid Lindgren’s books, of course. I only know the translator titles. I don’t even know, in German, I think Pippi Longstocking, I guess, is the one. Then Michel and the guy with Karlsson, the guy with the propeller on his back?

B.J.: Oh, yes. Karlsson på taket, yes. Karlsson-on-the-Roof.

Florian: I think that one’s still holding up quite well today. For example, with Michel on the farm, he gets beaten up by his father and locked into a shed and all of that, which might have been very normal in the ’50s, but today you’re reading it, it’s like, that’s some harsh treatment there. I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying that’s the delta between time. How is it right now between Swedish, what’s acceptable there, and the global English culture?

B.J.: Astrid Lingren is a really interesting example because even at the time she was writing, people were concerned about translating her work. Pippi, who you mentioned, she holds a horse. She’s the strongest girl in the world, and she holds her horse above her head. When they were translating that to French, apparently the French publishers were worried because they thought French children were going to go out and try to lift horses. It was like the power of the imagination seemed to go above their heads there because they were thinking children are so dumb that they’re not going to realize that this is in the book. Even then, and also, you mentioned time, and things do change over time. I mean, Astrid Lingren used some words that we would not use in Swedish or in English today. People have talked about revising, revamping some of her works. That’s true of other authors, too. In terms of the cultural differences, there are pretty big ones. I think early on, I was pretty shocked at how much editors were saying we needed to change texts for the English-speaking market. I would say it usually is in that direction, going from Swedish to English, that people are concerned. They’re saying, oh, well, okay, it’s fine to show knives in the Swedish picture book, but we’re not going to do that in the English version. Or we’re going to show nipples, for example, somebody breastfeeding or somebody in the bath, but that’s not acceptable in an English language text. You get these funny situations where somebody will be in the bath in a picture book, but they’re wearing a swimsuit in the English version because you can’t show that somebody would be naked in the bath. I have to deal with quite a lot of that in translating. It’s a very fine balance because most of the authors I’m working with are alive, and they have, of course, very strong opinions about how their work should be translated. I try to talk to them about, okay, well, here’s what’s going on. Here’s what the publisher or the editor is saying. What do you think? Sometimes they’re just so happy to be translated in English that they go, yeah, whatever change, that’s okay. Other times they’re saying, that is not appropriate at all, and I’m not going to accept that. I have to work, I guess, be like an ombudsman between my author and the editor. It’s really challenging at times. I would say that I’m not an expert, of course, on German language literature, but from talking to people who translate to German, I think that German language literature is more similar to Swedish language literature with more flexibility, more liberalness, more understanding of what childhood is like and what children are like, whereas in the English-speaking cultures, people are a lot more prudish and a lot more conservative.

Florian: I’m not super up to date on current day, I just like all of the classics of German children’s literature. There’s just so much beating up and locking some one guy in a cellar for two days. It’s just totally natural. Then you’re thinking about this coming out today. You’re like, okay. Now, you’re saying that currently you’re talking to to the authors, and some of them are more amenable to changing, and others are like, no, this is my work and you can’t change it. How about if there’s no live author like with Astrid Lingren? Is there somebody in charge of her legacy?

B.J.: I want to say it’s her grandchildren. They definitely still hold the rights and do a lot to protect that. I think that’s true with a lot of big names, that it’s their children or grandchildren who are, as you say, protecting the legacy and making final decisions. But in some cases, the copyright is out and it’s out there in the public sphere. In that case, the editor makes the final decisions. Sometimes it can be really tricky. But yeah, I feel like my loyalty as a translator is with my author and the text, but my client is usually the editor and the publisher. That is a tricky balance at times.

Florian: This is fascinating. How are you being put in that middle role? Are you in that middle role? Do you have to actually directly liaise with the author? I mean, if it’s a book that goes into 30 language, is there some other central person that would manage this?

B.J.: That’s such a good question. I think it really depends on the circumstances. In a few cases where I have an author who does not want to communicate in English, for example, or cannot communicate in English, I say, okay, I get an email from the editor in English, and then I write a version of it in Swedish to my author and say, what do you think? Then I go back and forth. I try not to get in that position, to be honest, because I don’t feel that that’s really what I’m being hired to do. In some cases, it is the literary agent who manages that. In a couple of cases, I’ve translated a text by somebody who’s very famous. That’s just been a lucky thing that’s happened. Sometimes they’re happy to have contact with me and with the editor. Other times, they act like I’m some servant that’s way beneath them, and they won’t talk to me directly or the editor directly. It all has to go through their agents, and that is a weird scenario, I feel. And I mean, JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, was infamous for not wanting to speak to her translators. And I don’t know what that was about and It seems to me really short-sighted because as an author, in your books going out to dozens or more languages, you’d think you’d want your books to be as great as possible, and you’d want to answer questions from your translators or have communication with them, but for whatever reason she didn’t, maybe she didn’t understand the importance of translations, I don’t know. That was a case where it was all mediated by somebody else. I think my understanding was that lots of translators got a list from her publisher of these are things that we expect you to do, and these are changes that you can make or not make without showing any knowledge of the actual languages in question.

Florian: That sounds like a tough job for the translator. I guess with something like her books, there’s probably huge confidentiality as well, because I remember people were waiting for these books, and then they will basically simultaneously come out. Is that often an issue for you as well?

B.J.: I have to keep confidentiality, but I’ve never worked on anything that serious, where it’s been like, oh, everything’s going to be published at once. I’ve had situations where they said it’s going to be published at the same time, but it’s never been like, this is going to be a best seller. It’s just this is what we’re doing. Obviously, I do have to keep confidential about who I’m working for and what I’m working on and not show the translations in advance. Anyway, I think that’s pretty good practice as a translator not to be blabbing about what you’re doing. But I’ve never been in that difficult situation. I have heard from a few translators that they’ve been gathered together. The translator to German, the translator to Romanian, and the translator to Japanese, they’ve been gathered together to work on whoever’s latest best seller, Dan Brown or John Grisham. They’re all told, you stay here in this hotel and translate this book until it’s done, so that all the editions can be translated and published at the same time, which is very interesting. I guess they’re worried about that thing that sometimes happens where somebody gets hold of an English version and they start doing unofficial translations and producing and selling them.

Florian: There’s something similar with certain Hollywood, like adaptations, dubbing, subtitling, where they have to keep it under lock until the very last moment. This is a very complex market. I mean, this is mostly a business podcast, SlatorPod, right? Let’s talk a bit about the market here in literary translation. Who chooses the translators? Who sets rates? Is there even some super fan translators that may go and say, look, I want to be the translator here, and I don’t even need to get reimbursed or something? Just tell me a bit more about the market dynamics.

B.J.: Yeah, it’s very tricky, and it also depends a little bit on your language. Right now, Korean is hot. If you happen to be one of the few people in the UK who is a Korean language translator, you can have your pick of the books, and that’s great. But if you’re somebody who works on German or Spanish or French or even to a certain extent, Swedish. I wouldn’t call Swedish a big language, it’s not, but a lot of books are translated from Swedish to English. It is harder to get the work, and you really have to build up your reputation. I wouldn’t say that I’ve got a major reputation or anything like that, but I’ve spent a lot of time in the industry history, and obviously I did a lot and continue to do non-fiction translation and business translation, too, when I can. In the UK, at least, we have a recommended rate, and that is set by the Society of Authors at the moment, I don’t want to get this wrong, but at the moment, I believe it’s £105 per 1,000 words. If you consider yourself a professional translator, then it’s thought that you should abide by that. Of course, you can set higher rates than that if you want, but it should be at a minimum that. Of course, you meet people who are so desperate for work or really want to work on a particular project that they say, yeah, I’ll do it at a cheaper rate. We also all get these emails from somebody saying, oh, I’m in India or China. I’ll do your translation. Instead of £105 per 1,000 words, they’re saying, oh, it’ll be £5 per 1,000 words, something really drastic, but then you have to think about what’s the quality going to be there. Swedish is slightly unusual from some of the other European languages, and that a lot of it goes through literary agents. A lot of us who are Swedish translators do try to get to know the agents and try to tell them that we’re available for work and what work we like to work on. There’s some people who love the detective fiction and other people who really are into historical novels and so on. With some of the other languages, it’s, I guess, more dependent on getting to know the publishers here in the UK. That matters for us, too. It’s just that it’s a slightly different system. The other thing that I’d say about the market in the UK is that English is very big, but as I’m sure you know and have probably talked about in your podcast before, literary fiction doesn’t get a lot translations to English. If you compare it to what you have in Switzerland or what people have in Italy and lots of other places where your rates of translation are much higher than what we’ve got, that means that there’s not a lot of work. Not a lot of us are full-time translators because we just can’t afford to be. What does happen, on the other hand, is that we’re used as relay translators. So occasionally, I’m asked to translate a whole book or even a section of a book, and it’s not going to be published in English. Instead, my translation is going to go to the translator in, let’s say, Japan, and they don’t know Swedish, but they want to publish that book in Japanese, and so they’re going to take my English translation and translate it from English to Japanese. So a lot of us who translate from Swedish find ourselves doing a lot of that work. Sometimes it’s called a sample translation or relay translation. Sample translation can also mean the thing that they use to try to sell it to publishers. It’s weird because there are a number of books where I’ve translated the whole book and I’ve never received a copy. I don’t know what’s happened. It’s just gone off to Korea or some other place, and they’ve translated it and published it there. My role was there, but never acknowledged, really.

Florian: Wow. Okay, that’s fascinating. It’s just because, I guess, Swedish-Japanese, that person would be occasionally busy, but it would be a struggle.

B.J.: Yeah, I think so. They must exist, but not that many of them, I suppose.

Florian: How do you build up your reputation in the field? Other than, obviously, there’s, I guess, a certain business hustle in this, but at the end of the day, you’re sitting down and you’re focusing and you’re producing a literate translation, which is an exceptionally hard thing to do. Again, how do you build up that reputation? What metrics do people use? Is it sales? Is it some agents sitting down and reading it and thinking this is great quality? Or how does that work?

B.J.: I think many of us build our reputation, initially, we do either book reports or what I mentioned before, the sample translations. That’s where we go to publishers and literary agents and we say, look, I read Swedish, or whatever the language might be. I’m not just speaking about Swedish, but translators to English, generally. I’m available. If you think that you want to translate a book from French, let’s say, and you don’t read French yourself, I’ll read it for you and I’ll write a report. They pay really low sums for that. I mean, you get a copy of the book for free, which is great. You can see I like books, so I’m happy to take a free book, but also maybe they’ll pay you, say, £100. You sit there and you read the book, take some days, you write an analysis of the book and whether you think that it would sell on the English language market. Those are called readers reports, book reports, whichever term you want to use. And that shows, first of all, that you’re good at analyzing literature, you’re good at reading that language, and also that you’re going to give an honest assessment. If you’re somebody who just automatically says, yes, let’s translate it, because you’re hoping you’re going to get that translation as a job, they’re going to not trust you. But if you say, well, this book has some issues, and I don’t think it would fit the market because X, Y, Z, then they’ll know that you are giving your honest assessment. So that helps to build your reputation. And the other thing that I mentioned, the sample translations where you say to publishers, okay, you want to sell this book from Swedish to English, you’re not going to hire somebody to do a whole translation. Publishers in the UK can’t read Swedish, so I will do a translation of, say, three chapters, and you can use that at the Frankfurt Book Fair or the London Book Fair or the Bologna Book Fair, or you can just send it out to publishers and see what they think and whether they bite. If you do that and your name is attached to the sample translation and they decide they do want to publish it, often that publisher will come back to you and say, oh, you did the first three chapters. Would you be willing to do the rest? Unless you hated the book, then usually you would like to. So, yeah, I think those are some of the main ways that we build our reputation. In my case, I was doing non-fiction translation for so long. Early in those days you didn’t get a mention in the book. You probably weren’t even on the copyright page. I think it was six or eight cookbooks I did, sort of coffee table cookbook with lovely pictures. My name wasn’t on any of them, and so I have almost no proof that that’s me. I’ve got this cookbook. But you just have to, I guess, lots of industries, build it up and build it up. Eventually, you’ve got a CV where you say, look, I’ve done eight cookbooks and I’ve been translating for 10 years. Come on, give me a chance here.

Florian: But it’s fascinating that there’s basically this entrepreneurial element that the translator, if they play it right and they understand which books will probably sell in a particular market, could make the publisher go towards that market. Then the better you pick and the better the sample translations are, the more likely it is you’re actually getting to translate the full book.

B.J.: It is so hard because let’s just assume you’re an average translator. I’m not trying to make stereotypical assumptions, but many of us are very happy reading books or reading text and sitting alone at our computers and doing some research. That’s the nature of our job and makes many of us happy. The idea of then having to go out and sell ourselves is really hard. A few weeks ago, I was at the London Book Fair, an event I’ve gone to lots of times. I find it really difficult to go around to the publishers and say, hey, I’m B.J., I translate, do you think you ever need a Swedish translator? I find it really difficult and really uncomfortable to do that because it’s not my natural way of being to try to sell myself in that way. I’m much better at the email. That takes me actually to another thing that they recommend translators, especially to English, do is to send emails to publishers, like query letters and say, oh, there’s this amazing non-fiction book that’s on the Swedish top seller list, and I think it’s perfect for your publishing company because of A, B, and C reasons. Would you be interested in seeing a sample? In some ways, we’re doing that marketing work, but it’s a little bit easier, I think, when you’re doing it from your computer versus in person with somebody.

Florian: Yeah, in-person sales and translation. Those are two skills that are rarely found in one. It’s a tough one. Now, when you go from Swedish to English, let’s just go for the language part. What are some of the hardest things for you or maybe just the broader Swedish-English community that you grapple with? I mean, cultural, but also linguistically, what’s some of the hardest things there?

B.J.: A linguistic one that I’m guessing, Florian, you might be able to relate to is that Swedish, like German, is an agglutinative language, so you can make longer words by just stringing words together. We don’t do that in English, really. I mean, we have some compound words, but we don’t go for the really long ones. I always find it funny how when I’m translating from Swedish. Often my English language text is way longer than the Swedish text because Swedish has so many fewer words because they do that agglutination. You can say something in Swedish, and also in German, in one word, and you need a whole sentence to explain that in English, and by the time you’ve done that, you’ve really changed the flow of something. And if you’re talking about a short story or a novel or something, it doesn’t work so well. So sometimes I’m sitting there having to think about, how can I rephrase this? So it has the same meaning as Swedish, but also works as an English language sentence and doesn’t sound awkward. And sometimes I can get really stuck in them, but the Swedish word is so perfect kind of mindset. That’s a really challenging linguistic thing. There are a few cultural concepts that are often a little bit challenging to translate. The famous one, I suppose, is the term lagom from Swedish, which means not too much, not too little, just the right amount of something. If somebody’s filling up your coffee cup and they say, how much? And you go lagom. Everybody knows what that means, what’s just the right amount. That’s a really hard concept to translate to English. Also thinking about Swedish to English is this issue of things being more acceptable to talk about in Swedish than in English. I gave a couple of examples from children’s literature, but from adult literature as well, that I was translating a novel excerpt, and it was going to go into a literary magazine. It was about a woman who was, I guess we could say she was going into a mental breakdown down. As part of that, she was having an affair with somebody, not her husband. There was a very graphic description of her sexual interaction with this man. It was a really important scene in the book because it described where she was at in her life. The editor of the literary magazine here in the UK was like, no, we cannot have this description. That is so inappropriate. I was trying to be polite to her, but I was like, but people in Britain have sex, too, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s an unknown concept, and adultery, also not an unknown concept. And this is a literary magazine, and it’s a novel. Then you have to make these decisions. And again, in this case, it involved the author who is alive talking about, well, how much can we change to make it acceptable versus it really changing the feel of the book? And so I find myself having more of those kinds of discussions than I’d ever really anticipated when it comes to translating from English.

Florian: That is incredible. I was going to ask you about AI, but the example you just gave, that’s as human a problem and a challenge as there is on pretty much every dimension. Good luck AI handling this particular challenge because you need to understand that the editor reads it, you need to interact with the author, then this is not something that technology can solve. How far has AI, basically machine translation, come in literary translation? Is there any usage of it? Are there any ethical concerns around it?

B.J.: Oh, totally. I mean, it’s really grown. I think that that was another thing that I hadn’t quite foreseen was how big AI was going to become. I was noticing it at the university that my students were using it for their writing, ChatGPT writing their essays and that thing. But I wasn’t expecting it really to be in translation because to me, translation is so much a human activity, as you said. But one of the things that other literary translators and I to English are noticing now is that we’re getting queries from publishers and editors saying, oh, we’ve used Google Translate to translate this novel, could you just come and edit it and make sure that it sounds okay? They’re saying you’re going to get much less of a fee. So rather than your, say, £105 per 1,000 words, it’s like, oh, okay, maybe we’ll give you, say, the equivalent of £20 per 1,000 words or something, because they don’t understand what is involved in translation, and they think it’s simply a matter of cleaning up the language. Oh, Google or whatever program they’re using accidentally wrote he instead of she. You could just fix that thing, and it’s not like that at all because besides the purely linguistic, there’s all the cultural stuff and all the stuff that we already talked about in terms of thinking about your audience and framing things in the right way. We are noticing a real increase to that. It is a bit worrying, actually, because I think in their eagerness to cut costs, translation is an expensive cost, we can’t deny that, but in their eagerness to do that, they are not thinking about that end quality. I think that is, yeah, from an ethical perspective, it is quite worrying. From a practical perspective, it’s like, are we going to have jobs in a few years? Because AI is going to get better. We are saying that I personally have said no to all offers like that that I have gotten. Some are really funny. I’ve gotten even messages from authors who’ve said, I’m going to self-publish my book. I’ve done the translation myself, just feeding it into some computer program. Can I just pay you £100 to go through it? It’s like, no, do you know how much time that’s going to take me? I personally am saying no to all such jobs. But if you’re just starting out in this career and you really need the work, I can imagine a scenario where people would say yes to it.

Florian: How often when you do the translation, you think, maybe never, but that this is basically an uncomputable thing you’re doing. I’m still checking, obviously, my role, I need to be aware of all the latest technology and even ChatGPT. Using ChatGPT for translation, you can prompt it, and then it gives you a more custom translation. But often I find myself thinking, I could translate it in a way that I don’t think a machine for now could ever do, because there’s so many editorial decisions, micro-decisions you’re making in your head that it can’t be computed in a sense. How often do you feel you’re making these creative leaps? Because I’ve never translated a book that somebody else paid to read, but how often do you feel you’re getting to that really human intelligence level that an AI could never replicate?

B.J.: It’s tricky because I know that technology is always improving. I’m putting my hands up here because I use Google Translate, too. There are times when I come across a word and I think, I really do not understand what the author is trying to get by using this word here. We use our tools. It’s like me saying translation theory is a tool, Google Translate’s a tool, my dictionary is a tool. I do use that stuff because I want to do the best job I can. But that being said, I can look at Google Translate, and let’s say it’s translated a word or a sentence for me, and I might think, okay, that does help me, but I need to totally reformulate that sentence. Or I think, no, that really is wrong, I’m going to ask some translator colleagues. I feel like I still need that human level. As you said, our human intellect does something different than computers. Who knows? Five, 10 years from now, maybe it’ll be there, but it seems very unlikely, given what I’m seeing so far.

Florian: Because then we could also argue that the machine has done a good job, and it’s in a sense, perfect. You couldn’t find any obvious errors, but then you could still quibble about the style. Because if you translate something, I translate something, it’s not going to be the same outcome. In literary translation, it’s hard for me to make that point, but how often you get to a target translation that is just not what the original said, there’s no way a machine could ever have gotten to that target. You wrote the target because of so many other variables, like the literary magazine, the sex scene you just described before. That’s something a machine couldn’t decide on its own, it would have to talk to these people. How often is the target completely uncomputable? Even if the machines are perfect, then do a great job down the road in five years.

B.J.: I think a lot of the time. I’m thinking about examples, let’s say a children’s book that’s in rhyming prose, or you could talk about poetry. You’re making all these decisions because you have, okay, you’ve got the meaning of the words. Sure, Google Translate or whatever can tell you that this word means that in your language, or here a possible translation is fine. But it’s more than that. It’s the sound of them. It’s, oh, there’s alliteration. It doesn’t understand alliteration. Oh, there’s this metaphor, so please don’t translate it in this literal way, but it has this larger meaning. Then you’ve got the rhyme in there, and it doesn’t care. It doesn’t notice that there’s a rhyme in there. Those are all things that you’re having to make all these decisions. Which aspect am I going to prioritize while I’m translating? Which is the most important bit here? And that I don’t think a machine can do at this stage. No, maybe not ever.

Florian: For Swedish, my only reference is our Astrid Lindgren’s one. For example, Karlsson. What’s he called? Karlsson? I mean, from the roof in German.

B.J.: Karlsson-on-the-Roof, yeah. Karlsson på taket.

Florian: For example, in German, they decided to not translate the term Lillebror, so they kept it in Swedish, little brother. So I think the boy’s called Lillebror, so they just kept that in German. While the rest of the book is just amazingly well translated. You get that Swedish flair and you feel like you’re somewhere in a Swedish town, but it’s so incredibly well translated. You wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t in the original, right? So very interesting.

B.J.: Yeah, making those kinds of decisions. A computer can’t decide. It would have gone through and said little brother, and then you would have lost the sense of that as being a name.

Florian: Now, for you, what are some of the exciting projects that you’re working on, maybe on the research side in the next couple of years in your role at the university?

B.J.: It’s slightly different because now I have this Honorary Professor, so I’m not doing any teaching. The latest thing actually that I was working on has nothing to do with translation. It was about equality, diversity, and inclusion, and the experience of Jewish academics and students in higher education. That’s something I was working on. That was all before the seventh of October. I did a survey with people and had all these results. I was planning to write that up as a book so that it was more generally about inclusion and inclusion in institutions and I’m not quite sure what to do with that because everything is different since then. I’ve put that to one side for now. My translation project that has just come out is on translating queer literature. I’m really interested in the concept of identity in translation and who can translate what works and how you even identify something as belonging to a particular group and what that means. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. You may have spoken about this and be aware of it, but there have been a few, I want to use the word scandal, but I think that’s a bit too far. But translation issues, we can say, rather than scandals, where there’s been a bit of an uproar about somebody being chosen to translate a particular work and people feeling that that person is not the right person to translate the work. I’m really fascinated by this idea of there being a right or wrong translator for a particular work. I want to go into that in a little bit more depth and explore that. The thing that I mentioned about queer translation, if a text is about somebody who’s LGBTQ, does that mean only somebody from that community can translate that text? And is that always going to lead to a better translation than if it were by somebody else?

Florian: I guess you could call it progress when people are starting to discuss who’s the right choice to be the translator.

B.J.: Yes, that’s right.