So You Want to Be a Translator
At the autumn careers fair in Norwich, one stall always draws curious students. A working translator sits behind it, ready to answer the questions that everyone seems to ask.
“Do you just swap one word for another?” a student wants to know.
The translator smiles, because this is always the first question. “If only it were that easy,” she says. “A machine can swap words. My job is to carry the meaning across, and meaning hides between the words. A joke in one language is silence in another. The real technique is knowing what to throw away.”
“So you need to be a native speaker of both languages?”
“It helps to be native in the language you translate into,” she replies. “I translate into English, because that is the language I dream in. I read the other language well, but I write best in my own. Most good translators work that way.”
The student frowns. “It sounds lonely.”
“It can be. The work requires patience, and a lot of silence. You sit alone with a sentence for an hour, trying three versions, hating all of them, and then the right one arrives. That hour is invisible to the reader. If I do my job well, nobody notices I was ever there.”
“Then why do it?”
For a moment the translator does not answer. She has heard the question before, but she still thinks about it. “Because a book written in a language you cannot read is a locked door,” she says at last. “I spend my life making keys. Most people will never know my name. But they will read the book. For me, that has always been enough.”
The student writes something in a notebook and moves on. The translator waits, dryly amused, for the next person to ask if she just swaps one word for another.