The final draft of a complicate translation I’ve been working on for months has been delivered to the publisher. The book, with a wonderful cover, is already shown in the main onlne bookstores. I admit seeing one’s own name in the frontespice is quite exciting. Next time, will it be the cover?
So, I’m no longer simply an odd technical translator, dealing all day long with ways of pushing buttons on some infernal electronic device. Now, I’m a philosophy translator, or - tout-court - a translator. If they sell me, they can attach me a pedigree
Well, in a translation the content is a matter of the author, but the language is something pertaining us, the translators. In Italian (as in French) there is a marked difference between /linguaggio/ (/language/ a word that in English could mean at the same time the articulation of the content and the language through which it is expressed) and /lingua/ (your native language, a distinction that in modern English is only preserved, if I’m not wrong, in the expresion “mother tongue”).
In this particular case I had to work on several unpublished manuscript pages, written in a language that was not the native one of the author. In the end, while I had nothing to do with the content, I was the author of the “original” language it was first published. Any translator will have to translate my own translation
Today, a six-column review appeared in one of the two main Italian newspapers. They don’t even badmouth the translator, so I assume this is good. They also seem to have understood what the writer was saying, and this is good too
Congratulations, Paolo. Reading translations, I’ve always thought that the power of the translator to enhance or ruin a piece of writing is immense. Clearly you’ve enhanced!
Congratulations! Any tips you may want to share with us on how you used Scrivener, what features, etc., in order to smoothen your workflow? I´m in the middle of a translation myself, actually, revising a translation which I had done as a first draft in word and finding Scrivener very helpful to organize the workflow. However, on a first day it took me a while to figure out what´s the most appropriate and I bet you probably have gathered enough experience to give us a few tips?
