The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2017 - 22

FEATURE

BY ROS SCHWARTZ
were working exclusively on that book).
But since, like all translators, I usually
juggle various projects and activities, I
then double that figure, which comes to
28 weeks, so I would ask for at least six
months to complete the translation. My
ideal time is nine months, partly because
it's such a symbolic figure.
I decided to ask a number of awardwinning literary translators whether they
had a comparable formula and whether
they felt that they had become faster with
experience. Here is what they said.

ANTHEA BELL

"How Long Will It Take You to Type
This in English?"
There seems to be a commonly held belief (among translators, publishers,
and readers alike) that the more books you translate, the faster you become.

es, I really was once asked this
question! A Freudian slip that
reveals how translation is sometimes
seen as "typing in another language."
I was prompted to pen this article
in favor of "slow" translation after
eavesdropping on a conversation between
two veteran translators anxious about the
fact that they felt they were "too slow"-
as if that were a bad thing. There seems
to be a commonly held belief (among
translators, publishers, and readers
alike) that the more books you translate,
the faster you become. The opposite is
true for me, because with experience
I've become more alert to subtleties and
complexities of which I was blithely
unaware in my early days.

"Speed" is rarely discussed openly
among translators, and I realized I had no
idea what others consider a reasonable
daily output or how they assess the
amount of time a translation will take
when negotiating a contract. For myself,
I've developed a crude rule of thumb
for a fairly challenging book (fiction or
nonfiction), which is an average of 800
to 1,000 words a day. While I might be
able to draft 2,000 to 3,000 words a day
once I'm in my stride, when I take into
account the multiple drafts, going through
the copy editor's suggestions, and then
checking the proofs, it seems to work
out at roughly 1,000 words a day. So, for
a 70,000-word novel, I would estimate
70 days of work (i.e., 14 weeks, if I

Like all the colleagues
I spoke to, Anthea Bell,
OBE*, a translator from
French and German with
decades of experience and
scores of titles to her name,
doesn't feel that her speed has increased.
"No, I don't go any faster than I used to.
I do think that I probably get a first draft
out a little faster than when I was working
on a typewriter. That is partly just technical,
partly because with time one does become
more used to doing what I can describe only
as thinking in two languages at once. As I've
said before (and translation is incredibly
difficult to describe without a metaphor),
it's as if the mind hesitates briefly between
the language of the original and the native
language of the translator, in a place where
neither language exists, but ultimately tries
to come down on the side of the language of
translation. And that aspect doesn't change.
But I find myself, if anything, even less
inclined to think that the result of the first
draft is the best. Sometimes it is, sometimes
it isn't. I have to go back over it all and
weigh up alternative phrasings.
I would certainly go along, in general
terms, with your calculations. Yes, we do
juggle several things at once. The easy parts
are the rough draft at the start and the final
read-through at the very end, when I read for
English only, returning to the original only if
what I've said strikes me as odd and in need
of second thoughts. The hard work comes in
between: revising, revising again, coping with
copy editors' queries, and then proofreaders'
queries. Yes, it's all time-consuming, but I
think it should be. We all know that it's never

The ATA Chronicle | November/December 2017

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