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Glad I was up by 7AM to attend "How Do They Read? Voices & Practices of Japanese Literature Translators" with Stephen Dodd, Polly Barton, & Ginny Tapley Takemori. They touched upon topics like authenticity, dialects, etc. I& #39;d like to share some points that really stood out to me.
I don& #39;t recall who said this, but it was mentioned that translating literature involves "getting into the world of a novel and trying to bring it to life in English". The phrase "occupying another voice" was a beautiful description of how translations exist vis-a-vis the original
As for the visibility of the translator/authenticity, Ginny put it very nicely with a quote from Sayaka Murata which explains how books are like musical scores that need to be performed/completed by their readers.
In other words, books need to be interpreted by their readers and translations create new scores and possibilities for more interpretations. Hearing this was very moving and powerful as it ties together the relationship between the translator and reader.
I wanted to ask a question about how they deal with differing characters and their dialogues (in terms of dialect/accent since I& #39;m dealing with that in 松本 and kansai-ben), but just as I was about to ask, they had beat me to it and began discussing it!
They explained with examples from gendered language/pronouns in Japanese and suggested that we look at what the text signifies & translating from there. Another solution was to try hearing the character and knowing what you want them to sound like or, representing sound visually.
This ties back to how Ginny and Polly concluded with some questions we should ask ourselves when translating such as: Who are you translating for? What is this (word/sentence) doing here in this text? What is its function?
We briefly touched upon tone/humor/irony, but Stephen mentioned that you find "the voice" of the author as you edit your draft, but it must also be appropriate for the translator in that it should fit what you think that voice is saying. Everything we translate is an attempt.
It was a relief to hear how other translators, like Stephen, set page goals for themselves! He said it& #39;s a good day when you turned a page of your source text (i.e. doing 2 pages). I couldn& #39;t agree more! 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😆" title="Lächelndes Gesicht mit geöffnetem Mund und fest verschlossenen Augen" aria-label="Emoji: Lächelndes Gesicht mit geöffnetem Mund und fest verschlossenen Augen">
Well that concludes this thread! If you attended and noticed that I missed anything, or if you want to chat more about translation, feel free to comment below~
