The crux of fiction
There’s a great four-part series over at the Centre for Book Culture’s Context forum on one of my favourite sources of despair: why the lack of literature translated into English, and can anything be done to resolve it?
It offers up the usual grim figures on how few works get translated each year, and moves swiftly to the inexorable conclusion that because the audience for these ew, foreign things is so elite and puny, non homegrown works are essentially money losers for publishers… so why bother.
John O’Brien (founder of Dalkey Archive Press, which has an impressive list of translated works to its name) pens the first three parts, laying the blame for this state of affairs pretty squarely on the shoulders of the foreigners – suggesting their publishing houses and governments should be organising meet and greets for Anglo publishers, and putting up the $30,000 it costs to get a translated work published.
He makes a good case, but I’m afraid that M.A. Orthofer, Managing editor of The Complete Review, makes an even better one in his Part 4 rebuttal, which begins:
O’Brien suggests, is for foreign governments to pay to play. Governments “willing to subsidize the true costs of publishing a translation,” says O’Brien, “could greatly influence what gets published in the United States.”
No kidding.
Lower the risks enough—by having most or all of the costs of publication (including translation, production, and marketing) covered by an outside party (appealingly distant foreign governments, in this case)—and chances are indeed good that publishers will offer a lot more of these titles (Hell, if I could get one or more governments to cover the cost of publishing ten books a year, I’d set up shop tomorrow…)
And goes on to outline why such a gorgeous scenario is probably not terribly realistic (e.g. only wealthy nations could afford it; general outcry against investing in foreign endeavours when so much work on literacy still needs to be done at home, etc.).
The argument essentially comes down to whether the problem is on the supply or the demand side, and I think we can reasonably conclude it’s on both, and that cages need to be rattled in all camps. (Gee, maybe if publishers actually tossed a few bucks at promotion – I’m sure Oprah’s giddy could be wooed to smear over a swarthy author with a sexy accent, or two.)
Okay, now I’m going to confess that all this was a painfully sincere and long-winded introduction to this very disturbing little nugget:
… Since American publishing houses are typically monolingual and have no editor whose specialty is in a particular foreign country or region, the publisher ends up hoping that the sample translation he sees might bear some resemblance to the final work and to the reader’s report that recommended the book. On the day that translation arrives, more often than not it isn’t what the publisher was expecting. Nor is the translation quite finished, which means that an enormous amount of editorial time is spent trying to get it into an English that will make sense to a reader.
Jesus, who are these yoyos (and why are they getting work)?
So maybe it needs to be pointed out one more time that, with a few truly praise-worthy exceptions, the literary translation business is very unfortunately like the Canadian publishing industry: once you’re in, you’re in, no matter how meagre your talent.
And perhaps in addition to all the executive-level endeavours, we need to focus too on improving the quality of the translations themselves (there is no shortage of fine craftspeople out there, hungry to do beautiful things) before those unilingual editors who can’t read the originals begin sharpening their red pencils.
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Comment
- Sadly, I doubt the problem is the language – it’s just the final straw. The US market, in particular, just doesn’t want to deal with different cultures. The first Mad Max movie (ok, not great art, but even so) was not only dubbed into Yank, but the film was flipped so that the cars appeared to be driving on the wrong side of the road :-(.
It’s almost impossible for Australian books to get published there, and when they do, there’s subtle pressure to change them so the readers don’t suffer culture shock. Celia Dart-Thornton wrote a fantasy series where Aussie plant and animal names were interspersed with European ones, and North was hot, and South was cold! You’ve no idea how good that feels… but in her new series, it’s back to the old northern hemisphere-centric north/cold, south/hot.
Sigh. It’s fantasy, for goodness’ sake. Why can’t it challenge your perceptions? Oh, that’s right. Everyone in the world understands American English, if you speak loudly and slowly enough.
— /anne... May 31, 7:50am # - Thanks for this link, I enjoyed (if that’s the right word) reading the articles. Did you see where O’Brien’s sample budget envisages paying the same amount to the translator of a book as to its editor? As someone who does a bit of both translating and editing, this made me froth at the mouth!
— Jaen Jun 3, 4:01pm # - Oh dear, indignation also made me incoherent – I assure you I don’t edit or translate sentences to read like like that last one!
— Jaen Jun 3, 4:07pm # - And I’m not a place in Spain. Oh dear, I think I’ll just crawl away like like like this and never return…
— Jean Jun 3, 4:10pm #
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