Finding The Author’s Voice In Literary Translation (While Silencing Yours)

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During the 56th Annual Conference organized November 4-7, 2015 by the American Translators Association (ATA) in Miami, I attended a presentation by the Literary Division entitled “Finding the Author’s Voice in Literary Translation (While Silencing Yours.)” The presenter was Mercedes Guhl, administrator of ATA’s Literary Division and the mind behind Traduzco, luego escribo, a blog about reading, writing, and translating that is written entirely in Spanish.

Mercedes was born in Colombia, started translating children’s books in 1990 while completing her BA in philosophy and literature, and later received her MA in translation studies from the University of Warwick, in the UK. Recently, while talking to her husband―who is also a translator―he asked her whether all books translated by the same translator end up having the same voice.

While pondering the question, she realized that (a) No, books translated by the same translator shouldn’t “sound” the same because translators re-enact or re-create the author’s voice in the target language, and (b) Yes, translated books may seem to have the same voice sometimes if the originals sound the same because they belong to a series, fall in the same genre, or were poorly written in the first place. “Editors don’t understand that sometimes a book could be translated in different ways,” she added, indicating that her husband’s question doesn’t seem to be very unusual after all.

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Paraphrasing Umberto Eco, Mercedes said that the best-case scenario for book translators would be to read as the ideal reader, but translate with the common reader in mind. As a general concept, by reading as ideal readers, translators can learn to emulate the author’s voice, since “the original provides a grid” for the target text to be produced.

She also mentioned the contrasts between translators from an earlier age, who translated books to understand and acquire knowledge, and modern book translators, whose work is intended for publication and distribution. Because book translations nowadays serve the purpose of being a product for mass consumption, translators must exercise their writing skills in order to “have the tools and resources required to imitate, innovate, and create when necessary.”

In order to learn more about the work process other book translators follow and how similar or different it might be from her own method, she decided to carry out a study. One of the main questions she added to a questionnaire sent out to fellow book translators was whether they preferred reading the entire book before translating it, as she does herself, or if they would rather read each page as they are translating it.

Mercedes was surprised to find out that many would rather not read in advance, since she believes that some texts “should be understood as a whole” after a thorough reading, for they could contain “landmines that need to be simmered.” One of the opposing views she highlighted was by a translator who, in turn, contended that “reading as you translate yields a more vivid and spontaneous version.”

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“Do you read to understand or do you translate to understand?”

Another curiosity Mercedes had was how translators first approach a project, which she calls “the first ten pages struggle.” Because she translates mainly children and young adult books, she says “it’s easier to just turn to the teenager you have inside and go… After the first ten pages, things come together and click. You go with the flow,” she added.

As for quality standards―which is always a hot topic when it comes to book translations, given the exposure that the final material gets―she wondered what her peers considered to be a good or a poor translation.

“I’m a little fearless,” she admits. “I was trained as an editor, so I am always thinking about the poor reader. It’s like a ménage à trois, and you have to be faithful to both the author with the original and the reader with the translation.” The two questions she asks herself to assure the quality of her translations are: “Is it internally coherent?” and “Is it adequate for the market?”

Among other questions she had for her peers were:

  • Is a book a 100% mind-consuming task? In other words, do translators read or work on more than a book at a time?

  • When and how do you read? Or, do you read to understand or do you translate to understand?

  • Do you look up criticism and reviews about the book you’re translating?

  • Do you talk to editors about your translation choices?

  • Do you follow a given method, or do you just “go with the flow?” That is, do you compile glossaries and take notes while reading, or just see what happens in the first draft?

  • How do you deal with dated expressions? Do you research equivalents or just make something up in the target language to make it sound contemporary?

  • How about loaded words? Do you provide a direct translation, replace it, or coin a new term?

  • When finding the voice of an author/character who is of the opposite sex, do you usually have any problems with that?

  • How do you translate dialogues?

  • What is your view about footnotes? Do you see them as a way you can “manipulate” readers, or would you rather remain silent as a translator?

  • During the final stages of the project, do you make minor or major changes?

  • Do you always have a chance to review your translation after it’s edited, so you have the final say?

The conclusions she reached at the end of her study were as follows:

  1. There are no sure methods or tried paths when it comes to translating a book.

  2. Each individual profile, set of skills, and background calls for individual methods.

  3. Likewise, certain projects call for a different approach.

  4. Creativity rules, not only in the general method, but also in the way a given project is undertaken.

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RAFA LOMBARDINO is a translator and journalist from Brazil who lives in California. She is the author of "Tools and Technology in Translation ― The Profile of Beginning Language Professionals in the Digital Age," which is based on her UCSD Extension class. Rafa has been working as a translator since 1997 and, in 2011, started to join forces with self-published authors to translate their work into Portuguese and English. She also runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators.

The Translator As Author

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During the 56th Annual Conference organized November 4-7, 2015 by the American Translators Association (ATA) in Miami, I attended a presentation by the Literary Division entitled “The Translator as Author.” The panel was composed of Mercedes Guhl (administrator of ATA’s Literary Division), Abe Haak (translator from Arabic, French, and German) and Faiza Sultan (Arabic and Kurdish interpreter and translator.)

Abe Haak introduced the material, which focused on the theory and practice discussed in “The Translator as Author: Perspectives on Literary Translation, Proceedings of the International Conference,” an event that took place in Italy in 2009 to discuss the issue of authorship in translation.

The first topic the panel addressed was when it is acceptable for translators to delete or replace content from the book they are translating. Some examples included complementary information that supports central ideas, but become meaningless once removed from the original context: references to local history, characters, and rituals, as well as figures and statistics. In order to support the argument, a fragment of Julia Alvarez’s “How the García Girls Lost Their Accent” was mentioned, in which part of a dialog was omitted in the Spanish translation because it referred to the character’s accent, so it was turned into an explanation:

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“Stop!” Carla cried. “Please stop.”
“Eh-stop!” they mimicked her. “Plees eh-stop.”

“¡Paren!”, lloró Carla. “Por favor, ¡paren!”
Los muchachos la remendaron, burlándose de su acento hispano en inglés.
(The boys mimicked her, making fun of her Hispanic accent in English.)

Another subject addressed by the panel was when an explanation or addition is welcome or even required. The scenarios presented included when the main idea could become confusing, contradictory, or plainly nonsensical once it is out of context. That would also be the case when cultural differences or historical references make more sense once they are supported by a brief explanation. Likewise, substitutions can be introduced by a translator when a statement or example is lost in translation and there are equivalent references, situations, or circumstances that can work as replacements.

Other subjects included adaptation (when information that is central to the text cannot be translated directly or replaced by an equivalent) and suppression (whether it is okay to remove passages that are considered inappropriate, and when it becomes censorship).

Lastly, Abe talked about the degrees of intimacy, when translators go from literalness to creativity, and the degrees of departure, that is, the level of interference they can resort to when intervening in the texts they are translating:

  • Notional departure = inspired by

  • Schematics departure = based on

  • Textual departure = translated from

“The farther you go into creativity, the less money you make, it seems,” Abe joked. “General interest books; that’s where you have to exercise most of your creativity,” Mercedes suggested.

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RAFA LOMBARDINO is a translator and journalist from Brazil who lives in California. She is the author of "Tools and Technology in Translation ― The Profile of Beginning Language Professionals in the Digital Age," which is based on her UCSD Extension class. Rafa has been working as a translator since 1997 and, in 2011, started to join forces with self-published authors to translate their work into Portuguese and English. She also runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators.

Beware Of The Fallible Filter And Unreliable Narrator: Enhancing Professional Trust

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During the 56th Annual Conference organized November 4-7, 2015 by the American Translators Association (ATA) in Miami, I attended a presentation by the Literary Division entitled “Beware of the Fallible Filter and Unreliable Narrator: Enhancing Professional Trust,” presented by Susan Xu, the senior lecturer in the translation and interpreting program at the School of Arts and Social Sciences of SIM University, Singapore. She recently completed her PhD thesis at the National University of Singapore on a topic related to autobiographical translation, and her session was based on her findings and conclusions.

Susan explained that the “fallible filter” and “unreliable narrator” are two forms of untrustworthiness in literary narratives. In the former, the narrator invites readers to enjoy irony at the expense of the character. In the latter, the author conveys a secret ironic message to his readers via the narrator.

She also clarified the difference between the “implied author” (showing the psychological and ideological points of view of a character’s consciousness) and the “real author” (showing the visual and linguistic style of the narrator’s consciousness). “Character and narrator are not the same person. The character lived in the past; the narrator is older, evaluative, and more experienced,” she summarized, indicating that there’s also a difference between the “implied translator” (whose name is indicated in the book) and the “real translator” (a collective effort by translator, proofreader, editor, etc.)

Throughout her session, Susan quoted a political autobiography to illustrate how fallible filters are transferred and transformed in the translation process in order to help translators reflect on their own practice and enhance their professional trustworthiness. The examples she presented were drawn from an autobiography written by Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, who passed away early this year. He wrote all his memoirs in English, his native language, and the book analyzed by Susan during the session was “My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore’s Bilingual Journey,” which was published in two separate, but similar editions: a 400-page Chinese edition by Lianhe Zaobao and a 388-page English one by The Straits Times Press.

Susan reminded us that translators run the risk of inadvertently interfering into biographies with their own voice and perspectives. These interferences can happen in the form of reorientations (weighing in on redundant or inadequate information), self-reflexiveness and self-referentiality (using the translator’s own idioms, polysemy, word play, and paratexts) and contextual overdetermination (omitting the author’s self-contradictions and erasing or creating irony.)

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In order to avoid bringing in this “other voice,” translators must analyze foreground elements present in the narrative, so they can identify the author’s distinctive linguistic pattern. In Lee’s book, these foreground elements are marked by syntactic contrast (sudden brevity) and underlexicalization (either noticeable suppression of a term or substitution of a complex expression with a single simple term.)

One of the most relevant interferences Susan identified in Lee’s book was the manner in which characters were presented. For example, the author showed a certain level of disrespect for the father figure introduced in the book and depicted his grandmother as a nagging, authoritarian person. All of these notions are implied in the author’s choice of words, but the translation into Chinese seems to have been culturally adapted to remove derogatory depictions of these two key persons and make sure that the respect traditionally shown for elders in Asian culture is upheld.

After introducing these concepts, Susan drew conclusions from her studies in autobiography translations:

  • The point of view in the interplay between the narrator, character, and readers accentuates an implied author who largely adheres to the generally perceived normative view of the autobiographer.

  • The factual, attitudinal, and ideological discrepancies present an altered persona of the implied author, who departs from the norm of the autobiographer.

  • The discrepancies are translator-unconscious in his effort to attune the narrative to the dominant ideology in the target-language culture and project a positive image of the implied author among target-language readers.

Lastly, the presenter gave us some tips on how to enhance our professional trust: “Every word choice makes a difference. Examine the foreground features in order to reflect the authorial tone. Also, adjust your point of view and align your consciousness with that of the narrator or character."

RAFA LOMBARDINO is a translator and journalist from Brazil who lives in California. She is the author of "Tools and Technology in Translation ― The Profile of Beginning Language Professionals in the Digital Age," which is based on her UCSD Extension class. Rafa has been working as a translator since 1997 and, in 2011, started to join forces with self-published authors to translate their work into Portuguese and English. She also runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators.

The New Normal: Cuba And The Power Of Translation

During the 56th Annual Conference organized November 4-7, 2015 by the American Translators Association (ATA) in Miami, I attended a presentation entitled “The New Normal: Cuba and the Power of Translation,” presented by Esther Allen, a writer and translator who teaches at Baruch College and was selected as the Literary Division Distinguished Speaker.

A two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowships, Esther was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She also co-founded the PEN World Voices Festivalin 2005, and guided the work of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund between 2003 and 2010. In 2006, the French government named her a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres and, in 2012, she received the Feliks Gross Award from the City University of New York Academy for the Arts and Sciences.

Esther’s ATA presentation was based on an article by the same name, which she wrote for Words Without Bordersonly two days after the normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba was announced on December 17, 2014. She mentioned that many U.S. commentators foresaw an “invasion of tourists, traders, and investors.” ”The mentality is that Cuba existed in a vacuum and now it will be Americanized overnight,” Esther disagreed, explaining that the country is no stranger to globalization, as its founding father José Martí had already written about the diverse origins of Cuba extensively.

The presenter told us that Martí spent most of his adulthood in New York City, where he wrote about the United States, and his articles were published throughout Latin America at a time when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. Martí was killed by the Spanish forces in the beginning of the insurgency he had initiated, which resulted in the Spanish-American War that led the United States to occupy Cuba and establish a naval base on Guantánamo Bay. The rest, is history, as we all know.

Curiosity: José Martí identified the lack of secular children’s books. He was writing some material on the subject, but his funder from Brazil withdrew funds after they realized the material didn't have any religious content.

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Recommended Reading:

Cuba: We Never Left
Written by Esther Allen for The New York Review of Books

As the translator of José Martí’s Selected Writings and currently a Biography Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, working on a book about Martí’s life, Esther analyzed how President Barack Obama mentioned the Cuban founding father in his speech. “Obama turned to address the Cuban people directly. He began with a citation from José Martí: ‘Liberty is the right of every man to be honest.’”

She wondered how Obama had arrived at that precise quote from Martí, and whether he had made a conscious decision to leave the second part out of it.

Libertad es el derecho que todo hombre tiene a ser honrado y a pensar y hablar sin hipocresia
― MARTÍ, José. Tres héroes: Bolívar, San Martín, Hidalgo. “La edad de oro” (1889), part of a series that is very popular among Cuban children.

The possible sources she found were:

  1. “Freedom is the right of every man to be honored, and to think and speak without hypocrisy” ― English-speaking guide at the Monumento a José Martí, La Habana, Cuba, February 2015.

  2. “Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy” ―Cuban student translation exercise cited in Enseñar inglés básico a partir de textos de José Martí (pedagogical study done in Santa Clara, Cuba, 2011.)

  3. “‘Liberty,’ Martí wrote, ‘is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.’” ― Carlos Ripoli, letter to The New York Review of Books denouncing the “Marxification of Martí,” July, 1988.

Esther went on to say that, in the late 1800s, Martí used to write for Patria, located at 120 Front Street, which is now Wall Street. “He wrote in English as a Spaniard,” she explained, “because Americans were more interested in what Europeans had to say about the United States, rather than a Latin American from a country that did not exist yet.” He also wrote a letter disapproving of a mainstream newspaper that talked about how annexing Cuba to the United States would not have been desirable.

The speaker said that Martí’s work as a journalist was paid, but not well enough, so he turned to translations. Martí translated Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, which came out about thirty years after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin and is compared to it because the former raised awareness of the plight of Mexican Americans just as the latter raised awareness of the plight of slaves in the United States. Martí then decided to self-publish and distribute the Spanish version of Ramona mainly in Mexico. Esther said that he used to call it nuestra novela (our novel), meaning that he believed the book spoke to the real struggles of Latinos, albeit within the context of the years following the Mexican-American War.

Going back to normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba, Esther reminded that, in the early 20th century, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz coined the term "transculturation" to describe the distinctive cultural characteristics of Cuban history. “And that history holds some significant lessons about the roles translation can play in the process of globalization,” she assured. Whether the new generation of American translators will now be able to keep in touch with Cuban culture and learn more about its literature is something yet to be seen. “Canadians visiting Cuba each year don’t have Communist cooties,” she added, hinting at how our neighbors to the north, just as much as British and Australian individuals, may be better equipped at attempting to bring literature from Cuba to English-speaking countries at the moment.

RAFA LOMBARDINO is a translator and journalist from Brazil who lives in California. She is the author of "Tools and Technology in Translation ― The Profile of Beginning Language Professionals in the Digital Age," which is based on her UCSD Extension class. Rafa has been working as a translator since 1997 and, in 2011, started to join forces with self-published authors to translate their work into Portuguese and English. She also runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators.

Attending Translation Conferences and Not Being a Whiner

I'm still pumped up from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, which ended yesterday in Tucson, Arizona (session reviews will soon be available at eWordNews . com!) And I'm already looking forward to the American Translators Association (ATA) conference that will start next Wednesday in Miami, Florida. To celebrate this conference season, I'm updating my YouTube channel a few days earlier than usual to talk about the benefits of attending professional events. Hope you enjoy it!

Trials And Tribulations Of Translated Literature From The Margins

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During the 56th Annual Conference organized November 4-7, 2015 by the American Translators Association (ATA) in Miami, I attended a presentation by the Literary Division entitled “Trials and Tribulations of Translated Literature from the Margins.” The presenters were Vivan Steemers, associate professor of French at Western Michigan University who has published Le (néo)colonialisme littéraire, a book about sub-Saharan Francophone literature translated into English, and Faiza Sultan, Arabic and Kurdish interpreter and translator and founder of DarSafi, a publishing house that specialized in translating and publishing literary and creative works.

Vivan started the presentation by saying that, for sub-Saharan authors, the very act of writing is an act of translation because, instead of writing in their native language, they write in French―the language of their former colonizer―in order to have more exposure.

She highlighted that, despite the fact that publication of sub-Saharan authors continues to be modest, the number of sub-Saharan books translated into English has increased since the 1950s. Two of the main books to start this wave were Camara Laye’s “The African Child”―which had originally been published as “The Dark Child”―and Mongo Beti’s “Cruel City.”

According to her, this increase is especially true thanks to the African Writer Series published by Heinemann Educational Books between 1962 and 2000 and, more recently, the creation of smaller, independent publishing houses. Still, “cynical, commercial publishers” in France act as “gatekeepers of ideas,” for they aren’t as aware of these authors writing in French and may not push for their translation into English. “These writers are left at the tender mercies of the Paris literary establishment,” Vivan wrote in her book.

Next, Faiza Sultan talked about another group of authors living on the margins, more specifically those producing Arabic literature about the Kurdish people, and how few of them are translated into English.

She emphasized the fact that publishers in Iraq aren’t authorized to publish anything before getting the approval of the Iraqi government. “They called it editing, I called it censoring,” she added.

Likewise, Iraqi readers don’t have access to some books coming from different parts of the world, which are banned for political, cultural, social, and moral reasons―and those who smuggle books face government persecution, even execution. Due to this censorship, Faiza explains it’s much easier for expats to get published and, consequently, most of the works written about the Kurdish people are in Arabic and Persian.

Faiza then talked about her own initiative to establish a small publisher to bridge the gap between East and West and tell untold stories about her people. The title she introduced to the audience was Salam Ibrahim’s In the Depths of Hell, the touching story of a man who survived chemical warfare in Iraq.

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RAFA LOMBARDINO is a translator and journalist from Brazil who lives in California. She is the author of "Tools and Technology in Translation ― The Profile of Beginning Language Professionals in the Digital Age," which is based on her UCSD Extension class. Rafa has been working as a translator since 1997 and, in 2011, started to join forces with self-published authors to translate their work into Portuguese and English. She also runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators.

Credit where credit is due (or "Let me Google That For you")

As translators, one of the technological advances that has revolutionized the way we work is this little thing called Google. Since the late 1990s, a world has opened up to us, language professionals, so that we could research terminology and read articles in our second language not only to keep up with trending expressions, but also to acquire more targeted knowledge in our specialty areas.

Well, it's been almost 20 years since this great search engine was invented, so how come people still don't know how to use it?

These past few months, I've been stunned by at least three separate issues that could have been easily resolved with a simple action: googling it. Having worked with book translations and covered the subject in my capacity as Content Curator at eWordNews, I'm always amazed by the fact that, to this day, translators still don't get credit in the media for the books they translate and, worse yet, sometimes journalists completely ignore that the book is even available in their own language!!

Okay, let me take a breather... And a couple of steps back before I lose my train of thought.

In my "past life," I went to Journalism school―all while working as a translator and language instructor―so I have a good insight on how things work in the media. Even more intensely now than back in the early 2000s when I was in college, the news nowadays is largely moved by press releases, because it's easier to report on something when you've already received all the information in a press kit put together by companies and event organizers. In other words, all the leg work involved in reporting is already done for you and, as a journalist, you just need to get the word out through the media outlet you work for.

So, let's get some specific details on the three issues that triggered this post:

1. Really? You couldn't even look up the publisher's website to get the correct information on a book?!

We all know that book reviews rarely give any credit to translators, whether the review is on the media or on a blog. So we should praise publications that point out (1) that a book was indeed translated and (2) who the translator was. Or so we thought...

Fellow Brazilian translator Cláudia Mello Belhassof specializes in book translations and noticed that Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo ran an article about one of her translations. Philomena: Uma mãe, seu filho e uma busca que durou cinquenta anos became famous because the original book in English inspired a movie by the same name starring Judi Dench.

Cláudia read through the review and not only was it mentioned that the book had been translated into Portuguese, but credit was also given to the translator! (Maybe not everybody knows it but, believe it or not, books don't translate themselves...) And, to her surprise, credit wasn't given to her, but to ANOTHER TRANSLATOR!

This mistake could have been easily avoided by one simple trick: googling it!

And, of course, googling it is not always enough. Checking the credibility of sources returned by the search engine is what makes a difference―as we all know, since translators must research reliable terminology in order to complete their work accurately. In this case, going straight to the most credible source means visiting the publisher's website, which will most likely point out exactly who worked on a book translation they published.

2. Really? The book is yet to be translated and released in Portuguese? How come I have a copy?!

"Amon," written in German by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair, was released last April in English (translated by Carolin Sommer) with the explanatory alternative title "My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past." But I've had a paperback copy of the book for more than six months now―in Portuguese! When I heard about the story and learned that a dear friend, Petê Rissatti, had translated "Amon: Meu avô teria me executado" from German into Portuguese, I asked my parents in Brazil to send me a copy for Christmas.

Following my theory that journalists feel more comfortable processing and roughly translating press releases―or even foreign news from prestigious international media websites―and simply "forget" to research information when writing their own articles, this is the only explanation for Brazilian newspaper O Globo to have completely missed the fact that "Amon" had already been translated and published in Brazil before the English version became available. The newspaper most likely had access to a press release written by The Experiment, which published the English version of the book, and decided―rightfully so―to report on this incredible story.

As any good book translator should do, Petê likes keeping tabs on news stories and reviews on translations he helped make available to Brazilian readers. But, to his surprise, O Globo originally said in its story that the title remained unpublished in Portuguese...

This mistake could ALSO have been easily avoided by one simple trick: googling it!

Petê contacted the newspaper to let them know that he himself had translated the book from German into Portuguese and that publisher Agir had released it in 2014. Since the story ran on April 5th, the Brazilian newspaper removed that section of the article, updating it three days after the original publication to finally mention that the book came out in Brazil in September 2014.

While searching the newspaper archives, I also found this story from 2013, which was probably published when they received a press release after the original German edition was published. It seems that NO STORY was published last year by the same newspaper when the Brazilian version came to light.

3. Really? You decide to translate the title of a book "freely" even though it was published in the target language decades ago?

After Hillary Clinton confirmed that she was running for president in 2016, Brazilian magazine Veja published an article about ten things readers probably didn't know about the former First Lady. You would think that, when writing about such a prominent figure as Mrs. Clinton, journalists would double check all sources to make sure they got things right.

Nope! While probably "translating" a story found in English, the journalist responsible for the article in Portuguese didn't even bother to research the name of a book Mrs. Clinton wrote back in 1996, when her husband was still in the White House. The Veja story brought this "Did you know?" fact to Brazilian readers, mentioning that "It Takes a Village" could be "loosely" translated as "Leva apenas uma cidade"...

This mistake, too, could have been easily avoided by one simple trick: googling it!

É tarefa de uma aldeia, which is the correct title in Portuguese, was published in Brazil in 1997 by Revan.

And, to make things even more entertaining, Mrs. Clinton recently wrote yet another book, entitled "Hard Choices," which might as well be in the process of being translated into Portuguese and could be released in Brazil any moment now. When running a brief article about this new book, Agência Estado freely translated the title as "Escolhas difíceis". Nothing wrong with that, since there's no official title in Portuguese, but they didn't pay attention to how the original name is actually spelled and ran the story mentioning "Hard Joices". Close enough, right? :-O

In any case, my little article is only intended to point out the lack of attention that books in translation get from the Brazilian media, but I can assure you that it's a worldwide problem. We often read the translator's name in a publication when the reviewer is pointing out something they didn't like about the book and that could only be attributed to a translation mistake, obviously―even when reviewers themselves aren't able to read the original in order to have enough grounds to support their gut feeling about the so-called mistake. When reviewers don't find anything wrong with the book, they usually don't even mention that it was translated, maybe because it would go against their views to actually praise a translator for a job done well...

Having said that, since this is the month we celebrate International Translation Day, let's raise awareness of what translators do and how we contribute to worldwide communications. Revisiting a wonderful campaign initiated in September last year by the Brazilian Translators Association (ABRATES), let's urge publishers to always mention the translator's name on their website and all press releases they sent out to the media. Let's also urge the media―including blog reviewers―to always indicate the translator's name as well when reviewing an international book made available in the local language.

In Portuguese, the hashtags created for the campaign were #NomeDoTradutor, #CadeOTradutor and #QuemTraduziu. I'd like suggest the following counterparts in English: #NameTheTranslator, #WhoTranslatedIt, and #TranslatedByWhom. What hashtags could you use in your language?

RAFA LOMBARDINO is a translator and journalist from Brazil who lives in California. She is the author of "Tools and Technology in Translation ― The Profile of Beginning Language Professionals in the Digital Age," which is based on her UCSD Extension class. Rafa has been working as a translator since 1997 and, in 2011, started to join forces with self-published authors to translate their work into Portuguese and English. In addition to acting as content curator at eWordNews, a collective blog about translation and literature, she also runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators, and coordinates Contemporary Brazilian Short Stories (CBSS), a project to promote Brazilian literature worldwide.

Keep Up and Use Your Language Well

Here's an update to the "Tools and Technology" YouTube channel. This month I'm talking about ideas on how to keep your native language fresh if you live in a country where it is not spoken. And the obvious comment of the month includes using your languages well. After all, languages are our main work tools, right?

Launching a YouTube Channel to Talk About Tools and Technology

A new online session of Tools and Technology in Translation will start September 29 as part of the UCSD Extension Certificate in English/Spanish Translation and Interpretation and I'm excited to add another resource to the list of materials that students and peers can use to learn more about how to incorporate technology into their daily work life.

The purpose of these videos is to share tips, some insight, and talk about the little stuff that either helps or hinders us during our routine.

Here's the first installment added to a dedicated YouTube Channel that will be updated every month with short clips on a variety of topics. Feel free to leave a comment there with ideas or your own experiences on the subject.

I look forward to hearing from colleagues in the T&I industry!