The Art of Translation

AFTER a recent translation conference, a young colleague brought up an interesting question: “I keep hearing people say that they translate from the Spanish, they translate from the French. Why the?”

Why indeed. This was asked of a carful of people, and the best we could collectively come up with was, “It’s an attempt to sound more professional, more formal.” Afterward, I wondered if there was something else going on, an unconscious desire to streamline language into a singular entity. “The Spanish,” as if there are not many Spanishes, as many as there are regions where it is spoken. More, probably. What Gregory Rabassa, who translated the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Clarice Lispector, and many others before his death in 2016, called the “wild variety of meanings, subtle and direct, that cling to words,” variations that are wide enough within a single community, let alone multiplied across territories.

I translate from Chinese to English, languages I find full of multiplicity and contradiction. Both are spoken across huge swaths of the globe, by vast numbers of people, which makes them difficult to contain—English with its porous willingness to absorb into itself all manner of local variations, Chinese with the literal and metaphorical boundaries separating its various domains. Having now worked on almost twenty books—fiction and nonfiction, in a variety of genres—and an equal number of plays, trafficking from and to about ten countries, I find myself possessed of many different ears and voices, to be deployed at the appropriate juncture.

We are familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s quip about England and America being divided by a common language. This is often spoken of tritely as a matter of word choice: or , or . Yet translating between British and American isn’t as simple as doing a find-and-replace for and . (Many people assume it’s straightforward, however. “It’s not arugula science,” they cry.) Even after half a decade in this country, I