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Literary Translation: A Practical Guide
Clifford Landers provides both beginning and experienced translators with pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Finding an outlet for one's translations is also covered.
214 pages, Paperback
First published September 13, 2001
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November 28, 2010Loved this book. Great discussion of a lot of translation issues, and the fact that it goes into concrete detail when most people just fluff and flapper without providing any real solutions is great. The author also uses beautiful language himself, which made me realise again that translators generally need to work on their native language more than their source language.
Definitely interested in looking up some of the books he's translated from Portuguese and giving them a go.
Definitely interested in looking up some of the books he's translated from Portuguese and giving them a go.
July 29, 2021
Having groped my way through several academic studies of this subject, I was astonished to find that I could understand this book while I was actually reading it (rather than rereading it). A healthy combination of common sense and useful insights borne of experience. Often cuts through the Gordian knot of theory at just the right point to avoid needless cerebral meanderings. Even the outdated parts from the dawn of the Internet age can give you some insight into the universals of the profession.
Notes and quotes:
The half life of a translation, it has been said, is from 30 to 40 years; every 30 years (or 40 or 50) take your pick) the translation loses half its vitality.
In the memorable metaphor of Gregory Rabassa, “There is a kind of continental drift that slowly works on language as words wander away from their original spot in the lexicon and suffer the accretion of subtle new nuances…
The Greeks have only one Homer. We have many.
Targeteers and sourcerers:
As Andrew Hurley, who retranslated the complete short story oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges, has intimated, one proceeds with extreme caution before opting to, say, rearrange word order in Borges.
Among the most common mistakes of inexperienced translators is that of trying to squeeze every last kernel of meaning from the SL text. This is usually the result of an overly zealous concern for “fidelity” to the original, but more often than not the effect is to produce an odd-sounding TL version that is a far cry from the author’s intent.
There are various categories of register, e.g. non-technical/technical, informal/formal, urban/rural, standard/regional, jargon/non-jargon, vulgarity/propriety.
The marked tendency of footnotes to interfere with mimesis.
Tone - this seems to be Landers’ catch-all concept to explain any significant divergencies from the SL. Probably just as well IMO to use a blanket term like this to cover areas of complexity that defy detailed description. Cutting the Gordian knot of convoluted theory.
There is integrity of tone within what I call the tone-unit - the text between changes in tone.
It’s always a bonus when a translator succeeds in retaining the quasi-subliminal elements of a text.
Brief interpolations:
Provide only as much information as can be conveyed without resort to artificiality.
Translator Thomas di Giovanni moved in with Borges for four years.
What to do with run-on sentences.
Break the passage into discrete sentences. The result, however, might well be a staccato stop-and-go effect that is just the opposite of the breathless, hurry-hurry pace the author intended. In short, it would change the author’s style.
Use semicolons instead of commas. Unfortunately, this runs the risk of giving the text a bookish, academic look, possibly not the desired effect.
Introduce a dash here and there, or even recast the passage.
Leave the passage as is, hoping for an exotic flavour.
Fiction
There are three basic ways to cope with lacunae in the TL reader’s knowledge of the SL culture: footnotes, interpolations and omission.
[Footnotes] destroy the mimetic effect, the attempt by (most) fiction writers to create the illusion that the reader is actually witnessing, if not experiencing, the events described. Footnotes break the flow, disturbing the continuity by drawing the eye, albeit briefly, away from the text to a piece of information that, however useful, is still a disruptor of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.
The penchant for footnotes in translation seems to follow national lines. The French, for example, use them regularly, even including asterisks to designates phrases [such as plus ca change] as en francais dans l’original*
A cosmetic operation
Judicious interpolation neither adds nor subtracts from the text. It merely makes it more accessible to the TL reader, while respecting the unique demands of mimesis.
A reference in a Brazilian novel to Dom Pedro II might be expanded to Emperor Dom Pedro II for foreign readers, but there’s no need to put ‘deposed in 1889’, dates of birth and death or similar biographical information.
At the first mention of favela I interpolated a short phrase “favela, or shanty town”. This later allowed me to use the Brazilian term in the remaining 500-plus pages of the book.
==
Evidence indicates that most translators prefer to avoid footnotes in fiction. In cases of absolute necessity, they may decide on endnotes or better yet, a glossary at the conclusion of the book.
Translation = the art of failure. John Ciardi.
Poetry
English is a notoriously rhyme-poor language. In Romance languages it’s almost a challenge not to rhyme.
Norman R. Shapiro:
True the Romance languages have a certain natural advantage, but it is more than compensated by English’s vast lexicon, considerably larger than that of its rivals.
Ty vy
I addressed him in the formal, not the familiar, voice.
Puns - compensation
Maintaining the tone is the principal concern.
Dialect
“No dialect travels well in translation. However reluctantly, the translator must recognize that dialect, at least at the level of one-to-one transference, is untranslatable.”
“Dialect is inextricably rooted in time and space. Whether based on vocabulary or on accent, the listener unconsciously associates such speech patterns with a region or a chronological period.”
“Any rendering of source-language dialect that consciously or unconsciously evokes an existing target-language dialect is probably self-defeating.”
“Dialect is always tied geographically and culturally to a milieu that does not exist in the target-language setting. Substitution of an ‘equivalent’ dialect is foredoomed to failure”
Though he does admit:
“It is possible to hint at unorthodox ways of speaking, if done sparingly.”
...by which I understand he means the occasional deft usage of generic sociolects, ruralisms or ‘uncosmopolitanisms’ that cannot be associated with particular regions.
I understand the argument that e.g. Cockney in the middle of a Czech work might make the reader wonder what an East Ender is doing in Central Europe. But I don’t go along with this argument. I think again audiences should be credited with a bit more gumption. If I hear a mild (not heavy) Brummie accent in the middle of a TV adaptation of Sartre’s Roads to Freedom I instinctively recognize it as symbolic of a certain kind of speech, a regional sociolect if you like. Likewise I see British northernisms sometimes represented by Ostrava speech. Seems reasonable to me.
Consider the use of regional accents in fantasy works like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Do we start wondering what part of the East End the oiks, I mean orcs, come from? :-)
Unwanted alliteration
“To refine the final details” is cacophonous. He went for “polish”.
Zero translation - when the presence of an offending term (e.g. Brazilian affectionate ethnic vocative) would be jarring and its absence would not be noticed.
Like some wines, certain titles do not travel well. For instance, titles with local place names unknown abroad (84 Charing Cross Road, West Side Story), snatches of proverbs of limited diffusion, plays on words or any cultural referent familiar to the SL reader but not to the TL audience.
Anthology titles
One has the option of choosing the most striking or least difficult title, followed by “and other stories”.
Title categories
Names: Madame Bovary
Foreign words: Cosi fan tutte
Literal
Adaptive or allusive: Primera memoria (First Memory): School of the Sun (US), Awakening (GB)
Landers advises: avoid unintended resonances (The lone stranger), unintentional rhymes, puns and connotations.
Sight dialect or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dia...
.
Notes and quotes:
The half life of a translation, it has been said, is from 30 to 40 years; every 30 years (or 40 or 50) take your pick) the translation loses half its vitality.
In the memorable metaphor of Gregory Rabassa, “There is a kind of continental drift that slowly works on language as words wander away from their original spot in the lexicon and suffer the accretion of subtle new nuances…
The Greeks have only one Homer. We have many.
Targeteers and sourcerers:
As Andrew Hurley, who retranslated the complete short story oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges, has intimated, one proceeds with extreme caution before opting to, say, rearrange word order in Borges.
Among the most common mistakes of inexperienced translators is that of trying to squeeze every last kernel of meaning from the SL text. This is usually the result of an overly zealous concern for “fidelity” to the original, but more often than not the effect is to produce an odd-sounding TL version that is a far cry from the author’s intent.
There are various categories of register, e.g. non-technical/technical, informal/formal, urban/rural, standard/regional, jargon/non-jargon, vulgarity/propriety.
The marked tendency of footnotes to interfere with mimesis.
Tone - this seems to be Landers’ catch-all concept to explain any significant divergencies from the SL. Probably just as well IMO to use a blanket term like this to cover areas of complexity that defy detailed description. Cutting the Gordian knot of convoluted theory.
There is integrity of tone within what I call the tone-unit - the text between changes in tone.
It’s always a bonus when a translator succeeds in retaining the quasi-subliminal elements of a text.
Brief interpolations:
Provide only as much information as can be conveyed without resort to artificiality.
Translator Thomas di Giovanni moved in with Borges for four years.
What to do with run-on sentences.
Break the passage into discrete sentences. The result, however, might well be a staccato stop-and-go effect that is just the opposite of the breathless, hurry-hurry pace the author intended. In short, it would change the author’s style.
Use semicolons instead of commas. Unfortunately, this runs the risk of giving the text a bookish, academic look, possibly not the desired effect.
Introduce a dash here and there, or even recast the passage.
Leave the passage as is, hoping for an exotic flavour.
Fiction
There are three basic ways to cope with lacunae in the TL reader’s knowledge of the SL culture: footnotes, interpolations and omission.
[Footnotes] destroy the mimetic effect, the attempt by (most) fiction writers to create the illusion that the reader is actually witnessing, if not experiencing, the events described. Footnotes break the flow, disturbing the continuity by drawing the eye, albeit briefly, away from the text to a piece of information that, however useful, is still a disruptor of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.
The penchant for footnotes in translation seems to follow national lines. The French, for example, use them regularly, even including asterisks to designates phrases [such as plus ca change] as en francais dans l’original*
A cosmetic operation
Judicious interpolation neither adds nor subtracts from the text. It merely makes it more accessible to the TL reader, while respecting the unique demands of mimesis.
A reference in a Brazilian novel to Dom Pedro II might be expanded to Emperor Dom Pedro II for foreign readers, but there’s no need to put ‘deposed in 1889’, dates of birth and death or similar biographical information.
At the first mention of favela I interpolated a short phrase “favela, or shanty town”. This later allowed me to use the Brazilian term in the remaining 500-plus pages of the book.
==
Evidence indicates that most translators prefer to avoid footnotes in fiction. In cases of absolute necessity, they may decide on endnotes or better yet, a glossary at the conclusion of the book.
Translation = the art of failure. John Ciardi.
Poetry
English is a notoriously rhyme-poor language. In Romance languages it’s almost a challenge not to rhyme.
Norman R. Shapiro:
True the Romance languages have a certain natural advantage, but it is more than compensated by English’s vast lexicon, considerably larger than that of its rivals.
Ty vy
I addressed him in the formal, not the familiar, voice.
Puns - compensation
Maintaining the tone is the principal concern.
Dialect
“No dialect travels well in translation. However reluctantly, the translator must recognize that dialect, at least at the level of one-to-one transference, is untranslatable.”
“Dialect is inextricably rooted in time and space. Whether based on vocabulary or on accent, the listener unconsciously associates such speech patterns with a region or a chronological period.”
“Any rendering of source-language dialect that consciously or unconsciously evokes an existing target-language dialect is probably self-defeating.”
“Dialect is always tied geographically and culturally to a milieu that does not exist in the target-language setting. Substitution of an ‘equivalent’ dialect is foredoomed to failure”
Though he does admit:
“It is possible to hint at unorthodox ways of speaking, if done sparingly.”
...by which I understand he means the occasional deft usage of generic sociolects, ruralisms or ‘uncosmopolitanisms’ that cannot be associated with particular regions.
I understand the argument that e.g. Cockney in the middle of a Czech work might make the reader wonder what an East Ender is doing in Central Europe. But I don’t go along with this argument. I think again audiences should be credited with a bit more gumption. If I hear a mild (not heavy) Brummie accent in the middle of a TV adaptation of Sartre’s Roads to Freedom I instinctively recognize it as symbolic of a certain kind of speech, a regional sociolect if you like. Likewise I see British northernisms sometimes represented by Ostrava speech. Seems reasonable to me.
Consider the use of regional accents in fantasy works like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Do we start wondering what part of the East End the oiks, I mean orcs, come from? :-)
Unwanted alliteration
“To refine the final details” is cacophonous. He went for “polish”.
Zero translation - when the presence of an offending term (e.g. Brazilian affectionate ethnic vocative) would be jarring and its absence would not be noticed.
Like some wines, certain titles do not travel well. For instance, titles with local place names unknown abroad (84 Charing Cross Road, West Side Story), snatches of proverbs of limited diffusion, plays on words or any cultural referent familiar to the SL reader but not to the TL audience.
Anthology titles
One has the option of choosing the most striking or least difficult title, followed by “and other stories”.
Title categories
Names: Madame Bovary
Foreign words: Cosi fan tutte
Literal
Adaptive or allusive: Primera memoria (First Memory): School of the Sun (US), Awakening (GB)
Landers advises: avoid unintended resonances (The lone stranger), unintentional rhymes, puns and connotations.
Sight dialect or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dia...
.
July 3, 2019
Well written and interesting with plenty of real-life examples (mostly from Portuguese and Spanish) to illustrate techniques and solutions for literary translation.
My only issue (and it's not the author's fault) would be that the sections of the book dealing with publishing, workflow, and a translator's tools are hopelessly out of date (the book bears a 2001 copyright). Translation memory (TM) tools aren't even mentioned.
Even skipping no-longer-relevant discussions of snail mail, dictionaries and encyclopedias on CD-ROM, etc., there's still plenty of interest and value about the nitty-gritty of the craft in this modest volume to satisfy either a new or seasoned literary translator.
My only issue (and it's not the author's fault) would be that the sections of the book dealing with publishing, workflow, and a translator's tools are hopelessly out of date (the book bears a 2001 copyright). Translation memory (TM) tools aren't even mentioned.
Even skipping no-longer-relevant discussions of snail mail, dictionaries and encyclopedias on CD-ROM, etc., there's still plenty of interest and value about the nitty-gritty of the craft in this modest volume to satisfy either a new or seasoned literary translator.
January 11, 2021
"الدليل العملي للترجمة الأدبية" للكاتب المُترجِم كليفورد لاندرز بترجمة خالد توفيق، بيستعرض فيه خبراته كمُترجم للأدب البرازيلي، بطريقة مرتبة بتغطي كل جوانب المجال، بداية من علاقة المترجم بالمؤلف من ناحية والقارئ من ناحية تانية، ومشاكل الأسلوب واللهجة والنغمة والعبارات الاصطلاحية والدلالية وترجمة العنوان الرئيسي وانتهاء بأدوات المترجم وبنود العقود مع دور النشر والمراجع اللي ممكن المترجم يحتاجها.
الكتاب مفيد جدا وغني بالأمثلة، حتى لو هيا مرتبطة أكتر بالترجمة للغة الانجليزية. نبهني لحاجات واداني ثقة ف نفسي ف حاجات تانية كتير كنت باعملها بالفطرة. الترجمة حلوة وسلسة بس يمكن التدقيق اللغوي والتحرير كانوا محتاجين جهد أكبر من كده.
الكتاب ف ٤٠٤ صفحة طبعة المركز القومي للترجمة.
الكتاب مفيد جدا وغني بالأمثلة، حتى لو هيا مرتبطة أكتر بالترجمة للغة الانجليزية. نبهني لحاجات واداني ثقة ف نفسي ف حاجات تانية كتير كنت باعملها بالفطرة. الترجمة حلوة وسلسة بس يمكن التدقيق اللغوي والتحرير كانوا محتاجين جهد أكبر من كده.
الكتاب ف ٤٠٤ صفحة طبعة المركز القومي للترجمة.
December 1, 2011
Very useful, informative, and practical. Great guide for beginning translators (or anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the business). Definitely using this in my class next semester . . .
February 3, 2020
A very engaging and comprehensive guide to the experience of being a literary translator. I especially appreciated the writer 's empathetic explorations of readers', publisher's and author's points of view in the process. The only flaw is that its discussions of technology are a bit out of date, but I think any writer trying to describe technology is up against it these days!
November 26, 2020
I read this for a university class in literary translation. This was a wonderfully written guide, and did not falsely advertise when claiming to focus on practical questions when translating literature. There was tons of useful information here and I expect I'll be keeping this book for reference for many years to come.
March 15, 2019
Probably the best thing I've read on translation so far. Practical, to the point, "get your hands dirty" kind of a guide that worked like a boost for me. Even though I can't speak any Portuguese or even Spanish and I'm not particularly familiar with Southern American culture, all of the examples seemed fully accessible to me and unveiled complexity and beauty of struggling with literary translations. No matter the language pair, some of the challenges are common as I've learned and those Sanders presents in an eye-opening way. That book was also a chance for me to confront the theory that I learn at the uni with translation practice - oddly enough, by reading another book.
I am sure I will be coming back to some parts, whenever I find myself in translation trouble.
I am sure I will be coming back to some parts, whenever I find myself in translation trouble.
April 27, 2022
Very interesting book for anyone who wants to know more about literary translation. As the title promises, this is a very practical account (no boring academics), but it can also feel too personal and it rambles too much at times - hence the 4 stars.
June 15, 2025
A highly insightful book that could use updates to parts like technology and self-publishing
August 30, 2025
Read for my Master's dissertation project. Very useful, covering a range of issues and challenges specific to literary translation.
December 23, 2025
It's a good (text?)book but:
1. It's oudated
2. It's very english-centric.
1. It's oudated
2. It's very english-centric.
April 9, 2013
i love it
Want to Read
May 1, 2013GOOD
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