As a part time practitioner of the great art of translation — mostly from Spanish to English– I am always on the look out for those who show recognition.  It’s shocking how often people don’t know they are reading the words of a translator or worse, that companies (and those who run them) are selling a book without acknowledging it is a translation. [Amazon and Audible, I’m talking about you!]  So here’s a very nice praise from a Nobel Prize winning author to her translator.  Worth the few minutes to read and the more minutes to think about.

…translation doesn’t mean just replacing, i.e., finding a familiar word in your own language to substitute for a word in a foreign language. The word has to match, which is much more difficult. A translator has to recreate the sound of the original. The art of translation is looking at words in order to see how those words see the world. Translation requires an inner urgency that will make that which is different as close to the original as possible. Finding this eye-to-eye contact is extremely difficult. It is a great art. –