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Who do you serve? The client or the author?
Thread poster: lien
Margaret Schroeder
Margaret Schroeder  Identity Verified
Mexico
Local time: 08:11
Spanish to English
+ ...
When the client is the author and both are happy that the translator improved his text Dec 10, 2003

lien wrote:
Tell me, who do you serve ? The client or the author ?


Lien, you have probably already seen this on the "other" list, but it is so relevant to this discussion that I copy it here:

Author Allan Massie wrote in this month's Literary Review:

So it's been interesting in recent weeks to have had the task of reading
and, in places, amending the French translation of what is perhaps my most
ambitious novel, "A Question of Loyalties" (1989). Interesting for several
reasons: first, simply because it is curious to read your own work expressed
in words that you did not write, so that it is different but still
essentially the same; second, because my admirable translator, Jean
Bourdier, has made some cuts, removing sentences, and occasionally whole
paragraphs. I can see that, in doing so, he has in most instances improved
the novel, by correcting one of its chief faults - a tendency to
self-indulgence on the part of the author. (How nice it would be if one was
able to set aside a novel for three or four years, and do that work for
oneself.) The result now seems to me not only authentically French, but a
better novel in French than it was in English. Clearly, I have been
fortunate.

Translation is a devilishly difficult craft. The translator has to be true
to the original, retaining its flavour (which will usually be a foreign
flavour to the reader) while at the same time giving his translation the
fluency and naturalness of a novel written originally in the new language.
It should read, that's to say, as simultaneously an English and a foreign
novel.
 
jaswinder singh
jaswinder singh  Identity Verified
India
Local time: 19:41
English to Punjabi
+ ...
author and author alone Dec 13, 2003

Basically it is the popularity of the author, which force the client to get the text translated. It means the message and meaning of the text is more powerful for any other interest, hence it should be conveyed by keeping close to the text itself and that take you close to author- whether paid by any other client.
 
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Who do you serve? The client or the author?







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