The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017 - 23

KNOTTY TRANSLATIONS

BY LILIANA VALENZUELA

Interview with Sue Burke, 2016 winner
of the Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry
in Translation
The Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation was established in memory of Alicia Gordon, known for creating
imaginative solutions to knotty translation problems, based on rigorous research. It is given for a translation (from French or
Spanish into English, or from English into French or Spanish) in any subject. The award was established by Alicia's sister,
Dr. Jane Gordon, and the award fund is administered by the American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation.
This column will feature individuals discussing a particularly tricky translation challenge and how it was solved.

f you've spent years working as a
translator, no matter the field, you've
surely run into a passage that takes
your breath away-where you know
you're going to have to slow way down
to get it right. This nugget becomes
a mountain, and before you know it
you've spent many hours, perhaps
days, immersed in just a handful of
paragraphs. The winner of the 2016
Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in
Translation knows exactly how that feels.
Sue Burke's translation into English
of an excerpt from a text written in
Spanish in 1688 by Joseph de la Vega
about the stock market provided
many challenges and satisfactions. She
graciously took some time out of her
busy schedule to tell us how she solved a
particular knotty translation.
A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sue
and her husband Jerry have also lived in
Austin, Texas, Madrid, Spain, and now
make their home in the windy city of
Chicago. You can find out more about
Sue and read her blog about words on her
website: http://bit.ly/2gIawtp.

What's your background?
I'm a writer. I started working as a
journalist over 40 years ago, and I've
written and edited as a career. In the
early 1990s, I branched out into fiction,
especially science fiction, and when I
moved to Spain in 2000, I made contact
with the science fiction community there.
As I honed my language skills, other
authors began to ask me to translate their
work. I enjoyed doing that and decided to
make it a second career.
www.atanet.org

How did you come across this
particular passage?
The Spanish Stock Exchange
Commission contacted me in 2015 to
translate excerpts from the 1688 book
Confusión de confusions by Joseph la
Vega, the first analysis of stock markets
ever written. They wanted to publish
the book in the original Spanish with a
translation of key passages into English
to use as an institutional gift. This
landmark work had been written in
dense and delightful Baroque prose, but I
was willing to tackle it.
In choosing my submission for the
Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry
in Translation, I found some sections that
stood alone and reflected challenging and
playful language.

I love to write, and translation
gives me a chance to focus on the
word and sentence level of writing.
How long have you been a translator?
An ATA member?
I started translating years earlier, but I
was certified in 2013 for Spanish>English
translation by the Chartered Institute of
Linguists Educational Trust in London.
I was living in Madrid at the time, but
I was able to sit for the exam at the
British Council there, hoping I could
fake British English well enough to pass.
With certification in hand, I joined ATA
in May 2013.

What was your process in translating it?
I read it through and laughed out loud,
so I realized I needed to keep it as funny
in English-somehow. A lot of the laughs
came from wordplay, and I could see
where some turns of phrase would be
relatively easy, but others were going to
require advanced strategy. So, I got to
work, sentence by sentence, and then
revised, revised, read aloud, and revised
some more until the deadline, which was
fairly close.

At what point did you think "I'm stumped!"?
This piece was written more than three
centuries ago, so the language was
antiquated. At that time in Spanish,
some words had no standard spellings,
and, even worse, de la Vega drew on his
deep knowledge of history, mythology,
American Translators Association

http://www.bit.ly/2gIawtp http://www.atanet.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2017