Unsung heroes of the word

A new year, a new col­umn. After 12 months of beat­ing the drum for Cat­alo­nia's up­com­ing sports stars, it's time for a change of tack with a brand new col­umn for 2015. Given my 'priv­i­leged' po­si­tion at the very back of the mag­a­zine, the title 'The last word' (as in get the last word in an ar­gu­ment) sprung to mind.

So, what does this fab­u­lous new jour­nal­is­tic en­deav­our con­sist of? Well, being the final ar­ti­cle, it seemed ap­pro­pri­ate to look back over the month's issue and com­ment on one of the re­ports, in­ter­views, fea­tures or even im­ages there in and pro­vide a short com­men­tary on the said ma­te­r­ial or topic it cov­ers or makes ref­er­ence to.

The rea­sons for doing this are many­fold and far too com­plex to go into here, but ba­si­cally the idea is to high­light ar­ti­cles you may have skipped or points you may have missed, while pro­vid­ing a bit of thought­ful con­text in the hope of ini­ti­at­ing fur­ther dis­cus­sion. The email ad­dress at the top of this col­umn is not just for dec­o­ra­tion, so feel free to agree, dis­agree, or add your two penny's worth to the dis­cus­sion.

To start the ven­ture, I'd like to di­rect your at­ten­tion to the two ar­ti­cles on pages 42-45, which deal with a new Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Josep Pla's work of au­to­bi­og­ra­phy, The Gray Note­book, which is trans­lated by Peter Bush. In fact, the book re­view by Michael Eaude is fol­lowed up by an in­ter­view with Bush, who pro­vides great in­sights into the work of a lit­er­ary trans­la­tor.

Now, let me de­clare my in­ter­ests. I am also a trans­la­tor, so nat­u­rally I have some sym­pa­thy with Bush's opin­ions about how chal­leng­ing the job can be. In the in­ter­view, he stresses the sheer amount of work that goes into trans­la­tion, whether it is the re­search (“Lin­guis­tic, his­tor­i­cal, lit­er­ary”), the re­spon­si­bil­ity (“A trans­la­tor makes hun­dreds and thou­sands of choices in the process”) or the in­ten­sity of the job (“You co-exist for months in a very in­tense way that can also be phys­i­cally ex­haust­ing”). Clearly, Bush is trans­lat­ing a major lit­er­ary work, but his points are rel­e­vant to some ex­tent for just about any trans­la­tion job. (If only I had a euro for each time some­one has sent me a com­pli­cated, 10,000-word text, and then has re­acted with sur­prise when they hear how much it will cost or how long it will take). Trans­lat­ing is time-con­sum­ing work re­quir­ing ex­per­tise and good judge­ment, spe­cialised work in other words, which makes it sur­pris­ing how poorly it pays and how lit­tle recog­ni­tion comes with it.

More­over, now more than ever in this glob­alised world, trans­la­tion is a vital ser­vice. Think about every time you sit down to watch a sub­ti­tled film, think about the man­u­als, cat­a­logues, books, con­tracts, treaties, web­sites, menus, apps, war­ran­tees, la­bels, po­etry, or just about any­thing that is writ­ten down for pre­sen­ta­tion to a gen­eral pub­lic. It all needs trans­lat­ing, and until au­to­matic trans­la­tion ser­vices be­come so­phis­ti­cated enough to be trust­wor­thy, some­one has to sit down and turn the text from one lan­guage into an­other. And if that is not enough, re­mem­ber that trans­la­tion has often played a major part in some of the key events of human his­tory. For ex­am­ple, if it were not for the Ara­bic trans­la­tions of clas­si­cal works, the Re­nais­sance may never have hap­pened, while Mar­tin Luther's Bible – which ini­ti­ated the Re­for­ma­tion – was a trans­la­tion.

So, next time you pop a video game in the con­sole, or pur­chase plane tick­ets on­line, or are moved to tears by Baude­laire's Les Fleurs du mal. Or, even, read cer­tain ar­ti­cles in Cat­alo­nia Today, spare a thought for the trans­la­tor.