If you’ve ever learned a language, even just for a year or two in school, you know there’s more to translating than replacing one word at a time. Different languages—especially ones that do not have the same root language, like Latin—can structure grammar in completely different ways. There are often certain words and concepts that don’t have an equivalent in the other language, making it difficult to communicate even if the speaker has fluency in both.
A cynical person might say that tools like Google Translate make it unnecessary to learn other languages at all let alone to employ a human to translate. A slightly less cynical person might acknowledge that consumer-level translation tools are less than perfect but still won’t put much value on the work of human translators. But real-life literary translation is about so much more than saying the same thing two different ways.
Cultural Differences
Even with recent leaps in AI—and don’t forget, even humble Google Translate has always been based on the technology that is now mostly referred to as AI—there are a lot of cultural nuances that only a human translator can understand.
When you consider the subtleties of expression in fiction, there are so many things we express with pretty strange word choices. For example, in a book set in New York City, a character might yell at a car, “Hey, I’m walking here!” Such is the cliché about New Yorkers, moving purposefully wherever they need to go and having to watch out for aggressive cars that are doing the same thing. So when they’re trying to get where they’re going as efficiently as they can, weaving and dodging through traffic, and a big car tries to weave past, they yell at them. This is such a widespread stereotype that many Americans recognize the cultural norm of New York intensity and would instantly know the speaker was either jaywalking in their urgency or the car was pushing up on pedestrian traffic in theirs.
If that scene were to be translated into another language, sure, you could translate the statement “I am walking here,” but that leaves out all of the cultural context as well as the surrounding clues that would explain to a reader what was going on within the scene, even if they weren’t well versed in stereotypes about New York City.
Artistic Intent
Writing is art. Art is an expression of humanity. By that fact alone, we know that any AI interaction with art cannot make up for a human translator and has, in fact, nothing to do with making and sharing art at all.
But even if you don’t hold human expression in such high esteem, you have to admit that we have not yet developed robots sophisticated enough to develop personal opinions about artistic expression let alone to interpret and express it in another language. That is the true role of a literary translator: to take a novel or poem or short story as a work, and to understand the nuances of both languages enough to effectively express that work through the medium of a different language.
This is why whenever a new translation of a classic work like The Iliad or The Odyssey comes out, it's such an event in the publishing world. Those stories are thousands and thousands of years old, not just from the date of their original composition but in terms of how long humans have been analyzing and repeating them. Every time another translator republishes the work, they are sharing their own take on the original, and we as readers can compare the translations without ever having to know how to read the ancient language the story originally comes from.
Art as Teamwork
The other reason that new translations of tragic works are still relevant is that they are not just a retelling of the same story in a slightly different way, but the translator is working alongside the original narrative and creating a new piece of work entirely. That’s why people will have such strong feelings about which translation of an epic poem they have read and why people who speak multiple languages might have strong opinions about how one of their favorite authors was translated into another language.
Translation as an art is the exact inverse of what happens when big tech companies steal IP to train their AI chatbots. When you use a large language model to write a novel, it’s actually a mélange of already existing work. And even if those materials weren’t stolen, the predictive text that makes AI responses has little to no artistic expression behind it.
Translators, however, work together with the author(s) to reimagine their work in another form, and they do so in a way that obscures their own contributions. With the notable exception of authors like Emily Wilson and Seamus Heaney, whose translations of classic epic poems put them in the spotlight, the average literary translator is usually an unknown, unsung hero and is often not even listed on the front cover of the book.
More Than Communication
There’s more to human communication than the literal, surface-level meanings of sentences. Learning more than one language is an incredible achievement, especially if you reach deep enough fluency to be able to translate an entire work of literature.
The next time you’re enjoying a translation of an international bestseller, take a look into the person(s) who did the hard work of translating; they’re a lot more impressive than anything you can copy from a chat box!
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.
