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This is what I do and why I think it is worth doing

In the context of conferences, festivals, exhibition openings – the kind of places where people gather to meet other people and collect useful information and contacts – when I have to introduce myself and explain that I work as a translator, the usual response is: blank. If I helpfully add that my area of specialization is "contemporary art and new media", the usual response is: slightly perplexed blank.

The first reason for this is obviously that the better I do my job, the more imperceptible it is. Anyone reading a text by an author I have translated should only be aware of the author and the ideas that the author wants to communicate, not of me with my ideas in between. When I translate a text by someone else, I try to "echo" that author's own voice and style as faithfully as possible within the specific limitations of the target language. When I write for myself, I write in my own voice, and there should be a difference.

Following from this first reason, the goal of invisibility, another reason for the blank responses is that I suspect most people are not aware of how translating actually works. Machines can do it, after all, and machine translations have meanwhile become quite good, sometimes even better than human translations in certain specific situations. However, I don't think I am in any danger of being replaced by a machine at any time in the near future. The kinds of translations I do require more than just picking out the right one-to-one correspondence between words in different languages from vocabulary lists.

The part where I have an advantage over a machine is that I can follow connections my authors are making based on what they read, the contexts they write in, and the themes that they write about. In addition, certain ideas, certain influential works, authors and schools of thought have a translation and reception history that may vary from one language to another. Certain terms from philosophy, psychology, sociology that are immediately and directly comprehensible in German may be known only as obscure scholarly terms used exclusively by specialists in English. Sometimes that makes it more complicated to find the most appropriate way to echo the author's voice. Or using a term from philosophy, when it should be one from sociology, for example, can lead to misunderstandings in English, even though it might be the same word in German. Words in either language may also carry heavy emotional baggage that needs to be taken into consideration.

The reason why I think it is worth making that effort is that I translate for people that I think have important things to say, and I want to make sure they are heard. To make myself invisible, though, I need to understand not only what the author wants to say, but also how and why. So I often end up reading the books and articles that are quoted and looking up extra background information to better understand the broader context. One of the benefits of my job is that I have endless opportunities to learn something new.

In general, however, I have considerably fewer opportunities to communicate what I have learned in the process, so I am very happy to accept Ruth's generous invitation to use this blog to attempt to do so.

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