Translation of novels and literary works

It is very likely that many of your favorite novels, stories or poems belong to foreign authors. Well, have you never stopped to think how it is possible that you can read all these writers and writers in your native language? In this post we will explain some basic ideas around the translation of literary works.

The translation of works of literature encompasses novels, essays, poetry, stories and stories, theater and even journalistic articles. But unlike other forms of translation, such as Technical translation, the audiovisual or the automatic, Literary translation requires a lot of effort and high doses of creativity on the part of the translator.

Translation of Literature: Put it in the hands of professionals

As we have already said, translating literary works is not an easy task. It is usually a task that demands hours of hard work, study and effort. For this reason, it is best to hire a professional translation service literary that this task can carry out effectively and accurately.
To make a good literary translation, it is vital to master and understand well, at least, two languages: the original language in which the work is written (English, for example) and the language to which that work is intended to be translated (Spanish, let’s say).

For centuries, philologists, philosophers, translators and interpreters have turned and around the following question: What is the work of literary translation? The question, as it happens many other times, opens up to more and more unknowns: is it consisting of copying the original to a new language? Or is it rather making a “version” of the original? Is it perhaps a rewriting?

The literary translator: What characteristics does this work have?

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German philosopher from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, once asked: How should a good translation be? It’s a good question, there is no doubt.

Schleiermacher’s doubts had some foundation. The philosopher was considering two theories: on the one hand, the translation had to bring the reader closer to the original work, and therefore also to the culture, expressions and linguistic structures of the original work; On the other, the translation had to bring the original work closer to the speakers of other languages, that is, the translator had to adapt the original text to the new languages, cultures and ways of speaking and living.

As some 200 years have passed since Schleiermacher’s doubts, we now have more tools and better answers to these questions. At present, the professionals of literary translation would tell the philosopher that the ideal would be to find an intermediate point between the two options that he himself proposed.

Translate is to transfer aesthetic experiences to other languages

In general, the translator of literary works is not limited to transferring information from one language to another. The characteristics of his work go further: the translator must convey the aesthetic and artistic experience that the author captured in his original texts.

The objective, then, is to preserve the values, intentions and feelings of the original work in the new language. How to do it? Well, looking for values, intentions and feelings that, in the culture to which it is translated, are equivalent to those of translated culture. It is also important to preserve the strength and literary quality of the original.

Finally, and by getting a little metaphysical, we would like to mention the theory of Walter Benjamin (another German philosopher) about the translation. For Benjamin, the original work is only the first version of a text, a version that will later be restructured and modified thanks to the translations that are made of it in other languages.

According to this Berlin philosopher, the translations illuminate and brighten the first text, a first text that, in addition, would end up extinguishing if it were not for the help of the new versions in other languages. The place of a work in the history of literature is not only occupied by the original and first version, but all the interpretations and translations in other languages that are made of it over the years and centuries.