Notes on translation — what gets lost, what gets carried

Every translated book is two books. There's the original — the one the author wrote, in the language they wrote it in, at the time they wrote it. And there's the translation — the one the translator made, in another language, often years or decades later, for readers who will never read the first.

Most readers think of the second book as a kind of copy. A delivery mechanism. The translator's job, in this view, is to be invisible — to disappear cleanly between the writer and the reader, leaving no trace. The book belongs to the writer; the language belongs to whoever is reading.

Translators know this isn't how it works.

The translator is an author

A novel translated from Arabic into English is, in a real sense, a new novel. The translator chose every word in the English text. The translator decided what to do when an Arabic phrase has no English equivalent. The translator picked a register — formal, conversational, literary, contemporary — that the original could not specify because the original was written in a language with different defaults.

Two skilled translators given the same Arabic novel will produce two genuinely different English novels. Both can be excellent. Both are interpretations.

This is not a flaw in translation. It's the nature of language.

What gets lost

There are categories of loss every translator knows.

Sound. Arabic poetry's rhythmic and rhyming structures don't survive English word order. Russian's grammatical compression doesn't survive English's need to specify. Japanese's ambiguity around subject and time doesn't survive English's strict pronouns and tenses. A translator who tries to preserve sound usually has to give up meaning, and vice versa.

Reference. A novel that opens in a Cairo neighbourhood assumes the reader knows what that neighbourhood signals — class, politics, history, daily life. A translation either footnotes those references (academic), explains them in dialogue (clumsy), or trusts the reader to learn (risky). Each choice changes the book.

Register. Arabic has formal registers and colloquial registers that don't map cleanly onto English. A character who speaks in classical Arabic in the original might feel pretentious in English. A character who speaks in Lebanese dialect might come across as undereducated to an English reader who doesn't know that dialect carries different connotations at home.

What gets carried

But translators also carry things across that didn't exist in the original — for the reader who needs them.

Context. A reader in São Paulo doesn't share the cultural assumptions of a reader in Damascus. The translator's job is sometimes to give the new reader what the original reader would have brought to the page automatically.

Connection. A book translated well finds readers who would never have encountered the original. Mahmoud Darwish has English readers who don't know Arabic. Naguib Mahfouz has French readers who don't know Arabic. Annie Ernaux has Arabic readers who don't know French. None of these readers are reading the "real" book. They're reading the translation. And often, that's enough — sometimes more than enough — to change them.

What this means for publishers

Independent publishers are translation's most important institution. Big international publishers translate the writers who already have international reputations. Small presses translate the writers whose reputations the translation will create.

This means the catalogue of an independent publisher is more than a list of books. It's an argument about which writers deserve to cross borders. About which voices deserve readers in other languages. About what literary culture should look like in twenty years.

When you buy a translated book from an independent publisher, you're not just buying a book. You're funding the translator who made it possible. You're voting for a literature that includes more languages than the one you happen to read in.

A note on URUK Read

We've added an "In translation" filter on URUK Read because we wanted readers to be able to find this work easily. Some of the most important books on the platform are translations — into Arabic, out of Arabic, between Arabic dialects, into English from regional African and Asian languages. Independent publishers do the work that bigger houses won't, and the result is a literature that's broader than what any single language can hold.

— The URUK Team