Let Translation Guide You Into Writing

Check out this writing and reading exercise from classes instructor Poupeh Missaghi

Translation can be either interlingual (between two languages) or intralingual (within one language but, for example, from one register to another). Even if you do not speak another language per se, you are still constantly engaged in various forms of translation. Think about telling the same story to your close friend versus to your boss at work: you use different language. Or imagine you have an event in a story narrated by a character in their seventies and during revisions you decide to have it told by a character who is a teenager instead. You can’t just cut and paste the narration; you have to make different linguistic choices. Or think about all the text messages you receive every day: Most of them include not just text but also emojis. By now almost all of us know how to read them—that is, translate and understand them. Another example is us interacting with visual arts pieces; whenever we describe or decipher them or do ekphrastic writing, we are engaging in a process of translation, by going from one mode of expression to another.

Here I invite you to do a writing exercise that engages with translation on two levels: One is reading a work in translation and the second is doing a translation of your own.

First, pick a piece of prose work in translation. Now, do a close reading of a section of the work, at least a paragraph, and pay attention to not just the content but also the stylistic and craft choices that are being made. First of all, think about how these choices might be inherent to the original language rather than the author’s personal choices—for example their poetic tone, longer sentences, or the narrative model used. How are they similar or different to the English language?

Secondly, remember that what you are reading is the result of all the choices that the translator has made; you are reading the author via the translator. Now, think about all the different choices that could have been made instead. For example, what other words could be used instead of a particular one? Or how would you decide to combine or separate particular sentences? Or would you provide further explanations to clarify something? And so on and so forth. This exercise will help you become more aware of the role of the translator as a subjective creative reader/writer. It will, moreover, invite you to reengage with the materiality of language and create a new text of your own that is, in a way, a new translation of the original via the translated text. This new text can in turn spur you to continue on with the narrative and write your own piece.

As a further exercise, I invite you to do a comparative study of several translations of one work. Think about the whys behind the choices made or simply see how they affect the reading experience.

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Did you love this exercise? Take a look at Poupeh’s upcoming course, Reading Translation as Writers