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A great translation carries not only what a work says, but how it makes a reader feel: its voice, rhythm, texture, humor, and silences. In Katy Derbyshire’s 2018 Scroll.in article, ten literary translators describe different ways to achieve that—and why smooth, word-for-word prose is not a universal standard.
What makes a translation great?
For the translators Derbyshire interviewed, quality is a matter of carrying a particular work into another language without losing its meaning or its intended effects. Those effects might include a sentence’s urgency, a narrator’s strangeness, a joke’s timing, or a deliberate awkwardness. Translation is creative writing, but it is writing answerable to an existing work.
The ten contributors offer practitioner perspectives, not a formal consensus or a universal checklist. They work across Dutch, Czech, French, Polish, Arabic, Swedish, Slovak, Japanese, and Portuguese, but they do not claim to represent all translators worldwide. Derbyshire also notes that readers’ tastes in translations differ.
Why faithfulness is more than literal wording
A word-for-word rendering may preserve individual terms yet fail to carry the passage’s force. Antonia Lloyd-Jones describes translation as a way for a writer to communicate with a reader in another language; rhythm, sound, genre, and differences between languages can make a departure from literal wording necessary to convey meaning and voice.
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Ros Schwartz likewise emphasizes spirit, energy, texture, voice, subtext, and empathy. She says, “A good translation conveys what is written between the lines.” The point is not to license arbitrary changes: the translator’s choices remain accountable to the source, even when the best target-language solution looks different from the original wording.
When fluency helps—and when it gets in the way
Readable, unobtrusive prose can be exactly right if it serves the work. But fluency alone is not proof of quality. Alex Zucker argues that translators should respect an author’s intended style and vocabulary, including choppiness, harshness, opacity, lyricism, or unconventional choices. If an unorthodox original is made to sound conventionally “normal,” its distinctive effects may be lost.
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David Colmer makes a related case for preserving urgency and energy, including ragged or frantic writing where it belongs. Sam Bett, by contrast, values solutions that do not call attention to themselves while still preserving a source’s strengths, curiosities, and even its dullness or weaknesses. These are not contradictory rules: unobtrusiveness may suit one work, while deliberate roughness or strangeness may be essential to another.
Sound, texture, and the translator’s creative work
Several contributors focus on the audible and emotional life of prose. Saskia Vogel values musicality and the feeling of a line as it moves through a reader. Julia Sherwood compares translation to arranging music for different instruments: the new version should evoke as close an emotional response as possible despite cultural differences and references.
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Sophie Lewis describes a balance between her reading of the original’s sound and intention and her own expressive voice. Sandra Hetzl evokes translation as carrying language from one place to another, like carefully reboxing something that has traveled. David Boyd emphasizes sound and surprise: “A good translation hums. It lives in the ear.”
Derbyshire points to Susan Bernofsky’s English translation of Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear as an example of voice and style at work. Its Soviet polar bear narrator’s life story combines slightly stilted and colloquial language with joyful word choice, sustaining a particular kind of strangeness rather than smoothing it away. The article does not specify an edition or format.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to think about a translation as a reader
Rather than treating smoothness or presumed closeness to individual words as a score, readers and reviewers can ask what the translation makes them notice and feel. These questions are interpretive prompts, not a validated rating system; the right answer depends on the work.
- Meaning and effect: Does the version carry what the source says as well as what it does to a reader?
- Voice and style: Does it retain distinctive register, including purposeful oddness, roughness, or opacity?
- Music and texture: What happens to cadence, sound, rhythm, humor, and wordplay?
- Fluency and visibility: Does smoothness serve the work, or erase meaningful friction? If the translation draws attention to itself, does that choice have a purpose?
- Cultural difference and access: Does the version help new readers enter the work without flattening its particularity?
The ten translators do not supply one formula for a great translation. Their shared challenge is more demanding: find a new-language form that lets a particular work live for its next reader.
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Source
Katy Derbyshire, “What makes a translation great? Ten literary translators from across the world weigh in,” Scroll.in, April 30, 2018: https://scroll.in/article/877186/what-makes-a-translation-great-ten-literary-translators-from-across-the-world-weigh-in.
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