Essays & Interviews on Translation

A selection of writing about the art of translation

Tower of Babel by Anton Joseph von Prenne

Public domain image of Anton Joseph von Prenner's Tower of Babel, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Throughout Words Without Borders’ twenty-plus-year history, the magazine has published many interviews and essays on the subject of translation itself. We’ve selected some of our favorite pieces from the archive on the task of the translator, racial equity and inclusion in translation, and careers in literary translation.

A silhouette of a man standing in front of a gray wall

Photo by Serkan Yildiz on Unsplash

The Errant Translator: Field Notes

By Sawako Nakayasu

Errant translation may take the form of performance, at any time or place. Such translations are difficult to see, publish, or police.

Photo by Sandro Gonzalez on Unsplash

In Praise of the Invisible

By Juan Gabriel Vásquez

More than once I have reworked a sentence with its translators in mind: to make it better or clearer, not lazy or self-indulgent: making sure it is worthy of their attention and their talent.

Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean

Multilingual

Edith Grossman is seated and looks away from the camera toward the stage.

Edith Grossman at the 2019 WWB Gala. Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Why Translation Matters

By Edith Grossman

Aren’t we simply the humble, anonymous handmaids-and-men of literature, the grateful, ever-obsequious servants of the publishing industry?

Translation and Identity

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Translating to and from a Native Language

By Alexei Bayer

In this essay, Alexei Bayer writes about his first and second languages, translating into English, and being translated into his native Russian.

The Milky Way is pictured above Earth's atmospheric glow blanketing Earth's horizon

Photo by NASA, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Topics in Translation

A river winds through the hilly green countryside in northern Sweden

Photo by Fredrik Posse on Unsplash

The Same River Twice: Notes on Reading, Time, and Translation

By Saskia Vogel

Saskia Vogel's translation of Linnea Axelsson's Ædnan has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In this essay, Vogel reflects on her years of rereading and translating Ædnan and considers how readers, texts, and…

The opening text of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

L. Wittgenstein, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Translating Philosophy: The Case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

By Damion Searls

The substance of Wittgenstein’s theories in the Tractatus is intimately tied to a vision of language that, among other problems, tends to produce bad translations.

Translating (in) Darkness

By Lara Vergnaud

How do we translate trauma? In this essay, Lara Vergnaud reflects on her experience translating scenes of graphic violence and abuse, and shares strategies that may be useful to other translators.I…

Queerying Translation

By B. J. Woodstein

There are feminist or postcolonial translation strategies so why not queer ones, too?

The Making of Originals: The Translator as Editor (Part 1)

By Karen Emmerich

As a translator and scholar of modern Greek literature, and now as a professor of comparative literature, I am what André Lefevere would call (not without some degree of irony) a “professional…

The Making of Originals: The Translator as Editor (Part 2)

By Karen Emmerich

Read the first part of this essay here. My answer to this question—an emphatic yes—is undoubtedly colored by my own experiences translating unstable originals. The first book-length translation…

The Un-X-able Y-ness of Z-ing (Q): A List with Notes

By Sean Cotter

Sean Cotter takes playful inventory of the cultural legacy of Michael Henry Heim's English translation of Czech writer Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, from sports and politics to celebrity memoirs and a film adaptation featuring Daniel…

Field Notes: Careers in Translation

A faded print depicting a path through mounds of rock at a quarry

"Carrière aux Sables de Macherin," Eugène Cuvelier, 1863. Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift and Rogers Fund, 1996. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.