Sentence examples for good translator from inspiring English sources
Translating is a true skill – a good translator makes tiny modifications to the text they're working with to make it as good as it can be, taking into consideration audience, culture, and context.
No, I have a very good translator.
When my publisher asked who would be a good translator, I suggested him.
When my publisher asked who would be a good translator, I suggested him.
"A good translator is not just fluent in the source language but must also know how to write an eloquent Chinese sentence," Ms. Wang said.
The linguistic fluency of any good translator tells them that, syntactically, "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte," is not the most fluid English sentence.
Andy Way points out: "There is just so much translation to be done – people have estimated that only around 5% of what needs to be translated actually is – that good translators will never be out of a job".
Although Tagore has had some good translators (Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Sunetra Gupta, Sukanta Chaudhuri, William Radice), it seems his own translations have permanently superseded any regard for his originals, just as, for a while, Ben Kingsley's Gandhi eclipsed Gandhi in the popular imagination.
Good translators work hard to bring across the feel of the original writing: the liquid smoothness of Ovid's slyly shape-shifting "Metamorphoses," the suggestive meanderings of Proust's sentences, the precocious adolescent grandiosity of "The Catcher in the Rye".
Excellent original novels, combined with publishers who believe in them and good translators, mean it's now as commercially viable to publish and promote novels in translation as it's ever been.
He dismisses as sexist nonsense the old adage, first expressed in French, that translations are like women – if they're beautiful, they're not faithful, and if they're faithful, they're not beautiful; although he doesn't mention the even stupider and more sexist nonsense that Nabokov spouted when he said that women don't make good translators.
