翻译像任何写作一样，直觉很重要，你一定不要忘记这一点。而且还要记住，直觉是可以训练的。

 

翻译人员做些什么可以提高翻译水平？

 

作者是在英国中心的文学翻译暑期学校写的这篇文章。这是一个文学翻译的强化课程，为期六天的封闭式文学翻译课程，并且作者每年都参加这个课程。BCLT暑期学校主要围绕特定语言的讲习班群体，但今年作者带领一个不同寻常的“多语种”讲习班;在作者的组内每周有九名参与者，且都是目标语为英文的优秀文学翻译者，而且源语言范围都很广。（他们之间有讲波兰语，意大利语，法语，西班牙语，拉脱维亚，匈牙利语，德语，亚美尼亚语，俄语，葡萄牙语，荷兰语，还有一两个人我忘了。）

 

阅读与写作是翻译的基本技能，并还包括自己编辑，而且所有这些都可以以多种方式来磨练。

我们一直在做各种工作以便锻炼我们更有创意的翻译肌肉，比如制定双关语标题，以适应有俏皮插图的儿童读物，等等。这些活动强调的是虚构和效果及小写细节，其是成功翻译，写作的要求。我们比较和评价了十八名译者对一短篇意大利的英文翻译，并试图重构几行哈利波特的翻译，在密切关注十个不同的非英语翻译之后，在这种情况下，其增强了我们的阅读性，而不是扭曲了我们自己的写作，因此事实上，每次都强调同样的事情。虚构，效果，细节。……

 

 

 

 

 

Ask a Translator with Daniel Hahn

 

 

What can a translator do to improve?

 

I’m writing this answer from a mid-week lull at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school. It’s an intensive, six-day residential course for literary translators and would-be literary translators, which I’ve taken part in annually since more or less the start of my own career. (Alarmed to discover, upon quick calculation, that this is my tenth… Hmm…) The BCLT summer school is mainly structured around language-specific workshop groups, but this year I’m leading one of a pair of unusual “multilingual” workshops; the nine participants in my group for the week are all excellent literary translators into English, but from a wide and wonderful range of source languages. (Between them, my lot speak Polish, Italian, French, Spanish, Latvian, Hungarian, German, Armenian, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten.) So how do you examine the translation process all together if you can never look at a single common source? To put it another way, what the hell was I supposed to do all week?

 

Well, it turns out there’s a lot that can be done. Reading and writing are a translator’s fundamental skills, and self-editing, too, and all these can be honed in many kinds of ways. We’ve been doing various pieces of work that exercise the more creative of the translating muscles, such as devising punning captions to fit the illustrations in a playful children’s book, or collaborating to produce a consensus translation of a collectively unreadable text using a kind of crib (after several sessions we’ve finally agreed—almost—on our nine-word opening line: “When the world ended, we went to the sky.”). These activities emphasise the invention and effect and minuscule detail that the successful work of translation-writing demands. We’ve compared and evaluated eighteen rival English translations of one short Italian paragraph, and attempted to reconstruct a few lines of Harry Potter by close attention to ten different non-English translations, exercises in this case which are about sharpening our reading rather than flexing our own writing, but which, in fact, emphasise the importance of attending to those very same things. Invention, effect, detail.

 

 

原文：

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2016/08/03/ask-a-translator-with-daniel-hahn-3/