The translator as writer

Susan Bassnett

Description

An article where Susan Bassnett defends the translator's activity as creative and necessary. Un articolo in cui Susan Bassnett difende l'attività del traduttore come creativa e necessaria.

Sujets

• Traducteur
• Traduction
• Littérature
• Écrivain
• Auteur

Informations

• Publié par: Itol
• Publié le: 05 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 219
• Langue: English

Extrait

 THE TRANSLATOR AS WRITER

Despite the growing global interest in translation today, literary criticism still

distinguishes pejoratively between writing and translating. Translation is often seen as

inferior to ‘creative’ or ‘original’ writing, with the translator somehow down-graded into

a second-class citizen with a lesser talent. Often, in reviews, the name of the translator is

never mentioned and critics write on blithely as though they had actually read the work in

its original form without having had to resort to the aid of a translation. This second-class

status is enshrined in the economics of book production also, where writers are often paid

far more than translators. Yet without translators countless literary works would be

inaccessible to generations of readers around the world; we may claim to have read great

works from Ancient Greece, Renaissance Europe, nineteenth century Russia or twentieth

century Latin America, but we have all had to resort at some point to translations. The

millions of non-English-speaking readers who bought the seventh Harry Potter book in

July 2007 had no qualms about purchasing the book in translation, and indeed its global

success is due in great measure to the skill of its translators. When the Turkish writer

Orham Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, his international

success was due in no small measure to the skill of his many translators

There is therefore a curiously schizophrenic position between the desire to read works

translated from languages that we cannot access and the down-grading of translation into

a second-class literary activity. Furthermore, what adds to the incongruity of this position

is the fact that so many great writers have also produced translations, though it is

significant that often their translations have received less attention than their other

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