The Craft of Translating Fiction
The work of literary translators has often gone unrecognized—unless it is a bad translation. According to an article in a University of California Press journal, Global Perspectives, which cited a study of New York Times book reviews between 2008-2021, the portion of translated works as a percent of the US publishing market may have crept up to five percent. [1] This is a pitifully small percentage. Contrast this to Spain, for example, where translated books are 25% of the total. [2] One might argue that some of this has to do with the comparable size of the markets and the ability of non-native speaking acquisition editors to read English versus native English-speaking editors’ comparative inability to read multiple foreign languages. Others might argue that translated works seem foreign and require the reader to work harder to understand the text. However, the craft of gifted translators, who elevate the original author’s text to transcend its “differentness” while still conveying its uniqueness, is an important element in growing the US market and its appeal for translated works.
Readers unfamiliar with translated works may assume that a translator has only to translate the words the author has written, but as Samuel McDowell, publisher at Chaco Press, says, the original text must first be a great story and then it’s not just translating words but “translating the poetry, the music, the rhythm that the author has painstakingly injected into their work. When that level of immersion can be achieved that is when magic happens.” [3] Every translator has their own process to try and make that magic happen, but many mention trying to capture the voice or the tone of the author. Most prefer to read the work through before beginning translation, to get a sense of that voice, or “to experience what it’s like just to read the book.” [4] Some might read other books by the same author to get a sense of their style.
Alison Watts is an Australian translator of the Japanese language into English. She is the translator of the international bestseller Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (Oneworld Publications, 2017) and The Boy and the Dog (Viking, 2022) by Seishu Hase, for which she won the inaugural Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize in 2024. [5]
Watts takes great effort to create each character’s voice while endeavoring to maintain the author’s style. She makes tables of vocabulary that each character would use and creates visualizations of the characters and their personalities to create authentic voices for each one. She “forages” for words and phrases. She will read a lot in English in the book’s genre, and if she is trying to craft a young person’s voice, she might watch Young Adult programs on Netflix. Author Seishu Hase is known for his “yakuza noir” writing, so while Watts worked on the translation of his book The Boy and the Dog she read more “noir.” Depending on whether a book is for UK. or US audiences, she might change the voice to suit. Watts finds books like Riku Onda’s The Aosawa Murders particularly challenging, as it has so many different characters without one main narrator, thus requiring the translator to cultivate many different unique voices.
Elisabeth Jaquette, a translator of Arabic into English, also discusses character voice in her interview with Bila Hudood about her translation of the The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous (Knopf, 2020). In that book, Jaquette expected to develop different voices for each of the two main characters but discovered they were quite similar, so she had to use their stories to differentiate them. [6]
Watts also discussed the challenge of translating dialects when translating Naoki Matayoshi’s Spark. Most of the dialog in the book is written in Osaka dialect, named for the city where it is spoken. Watts tried to distinguish the dialect from any “standard” English. On the topic of translating dialects, Watts shared a story about a translation workshop she attended, where translators all worked on the same section from Chichi to Ran (Breast and Eggs, Europa Editions, 2020, by Mieko Kawakami), a book written entirely in Osaka dialect. Just for fun, the translators provided versions in “standard” English, Mancunian (Manchester, UK.), and Southern (Georgia, US). “It highlight[ed] the issues that arise as you try to transpose a dialect,” Watts said. “It raises all kinds of expectations in the reader.” [7]
Jaquette also discussed her challenges with translating dialect as she discussed examples of Syrian dialects, how dialects differ by sex, and the dialect’s difference from classic Arabic. For these translators, translating dialect is a challenge but also an opportunity to show the nuances of another language, just as someone from the Southern US might use different phrases and colloquialisms from a Bostonian or someone from Hawaii. As Watts said, the translator must be careful to convey the right style or voice for the character through such choices to make the character more authentic and not create the wrong expectations in the reader.
Watts also touched on the challenges of translating humor, which is often very culture-centric. Without understanding the context of the culture, some humor won’t translate and must be adapted. In an article for the American Translators Association, Marina Ilari writes about how puns and wordplay often require completely different contexts to create the same humorous effect. It is also important to consider the author’s intention with the joke, Ilari says, because “perhaps the author was purposely using a joke that’s not funny for a reason.”[8]
Differences in cultural approaches to storytelling can also present challenges for translators. Watts spoke about Japanese culture, its influence on the country’s writers and storytelling, and how that might contrast with Western approaches to storytelling. Whereas Western style fiction might have an inciting incident with the story rising to a climax, many Japanese stories seem to be more loosely connected ideas. Watts said, “Japanese storytelling, a lot of the time, is about making a picture, creating impressions, and there is definitely not the same compulsion to ‘wrap up’ in the same way. I think the Japanese worldview influences what is a satisfactory ending.” [9] She explained that Shintoism, a Japanese indigenous religion which suggests nature’s spirit is in everything, influences that worldview, and cited Sweet Bean Paste as an illustration of this, where the ending depicts a scene in the forest where some of the characters have gone to see a tree planted in memory of one of their friends. The scene closes with a full moon rising above the tree.
All of these differences in language and culture make translation more than just an interpretation of words. “You learn so much about yourself, your biases and your assumptions by reading widely in translation,” says Viv Groskop, writer, critic, and judge of the 2022 Booker prize. [10] “You get to eavesdrop on conversations you would never understand or never even know about. You get a window into the mind and imagination of
other cultures. You get to see what other people near and far are thinking about—which can make you feel hyper-connected to humanity or deliciously able to escape your own insular culture.”
A gifted translator knows more than the language being translated. “There’s something magical about translated fiction,” continues Groskop. “It’s one of the most direct and intimate human experiences we can share with someone who has a different native language to us. I’m in awe of the translators who facilitate that connection.” Translators must be able to create the context of the culture and the people that “inhabit” the language and enable the reader to experience that as part of the story the original author weaves. The voices of the characters, the style of the author’s writing, dialects, and humor: all of that must be taken into consideration. It is the craft of the translator that makes the story come alive and captures that magic for a broader audience.
[1] Whence the 3 Percent?: How Far Have We Come toward Decentering America’s Literary Preference? | Global Perspectives | University of California Press
[2] https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2014-02/name-the-translator/
[3] https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/the-art-of-translation
[4] https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/the-art-of-translation
[5] She has also translated Spark by comedian Naoki Matayoshi (Pushkin Press, 2020, made into a Japanese Netflix series), The Aosawa Murders (Bitter Lemon Press, 2020, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2020) and Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight (Bitter Lemon Press, 2022) by Riku Onda, What You Are Looking For is in the Library (Hanover Square Press, 2023) by Michiko Aoyama, https://alisonwattstranslator.weebly.com/
[6] Elisabeth Jaquette, interview by Bila Hudood, Apr. 24, 2020, YouTube, 17:50.
[7] Alison Watts, interview by Beth Mathews, Sep. 24, 2024, zoom, 41:05.
[8] Marina Ilari, “Translating Humor Is a Serious Business,” March 7, 2021, American Translators Association, https://www.atanet.org/growing-your-career/translating-humor-is-a-serious-business/
[9] Watts, interview
[10] Sarah Shaffi, “The Art of Translation,” https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/the-art- of-translation
