Hearing Voices – Cheryl

I like the idea that translation is about hearing voices—capturing the personality of a writer, narrator or character and transferring it onto a page in a different language. The reality of the publishing industry, however, as Copeland elucidates, is that in the process of getting a story out into the world, we are inundated with a host of other voices too: the authors', the editors' and the readers'. 

We spend a lot of time in class discussing and debating translation theory—foreignisation, localisation, what to change, what to keep, but we forget that more often than not the final say may not be ours. Is this something we should protest in righteous, academic anger or something we have to accept, as cogs in a capitalist machine? There is art for art's sake, but then there are also people with families to feed whose books sold will only be read if they are written in a way that is able to engage them. 

The more I learn about translation and the industry surrounding it the more questions I find with no clear answers.