20 October 2008

Entry 5

Just a little example of working process, if you’re interested.

I don’t know how most translators work, but I’m someone who never works slowly and methodically from the beginning of the book to the end, getting it right as I go.

I prefer to hurtle through, basically translating at the speed at which I can type, and leaving notes to myself, queries, vocabulary problems etc marked down along the way, but not letting myself be tripped up by them as I go (I find getting the rhythm right is much easier like this, even if I don’t know all the words or what I’m doing…).

And then I go back over the whole thing and slowly fill in the gaps: look up in the dictionary those words I didn’t know (usually sitting IN UPPER-CASE, accusingly, waiting to be attended to); find the right English word for the ones I do know in Portuguese but haven’t quite yet pinned down satisfactorily in my version; solve those tricky problems of wordplay and other things that require more attention than I can give them on the fly.

So my first draft always looks something like this:

(It’s the very brief second chapter of the second section of the book.)

Chapter 2

Did you have many friends as a kid?

Lídia – Artur was my first friend. There was also [I also had?] a dog [cão], a gigantic PERDIGUEIRO, who was a bit crazy, which my grandfather named after the Portuguese governor of the day, Eduardo Ferreira Viana. We had another dog [cachorro], but he was old and avoided children. He was called Salazar.

When was the first time you left Luanda?

Lídia – The first trip I remember taking was to Canhoca, a stop [apeadeiro] on the Malange railroad. My grandfather went to visit a friend and took me with him. The train scared me. It seemed very large, tumultuous*, smoky. We occupied a compartment in the first class carriage, and I was at the window [had the window seat?]. It was early in the morning [madrugada], the air was wet and smelled of ripe fruit. I looked out and saw the quitandeiras* selling large green oranges. A blue-suited [-uniformed?] man unrolled a BANDEIROLA and went past us, trotting towards the locomotive. He was shouting: PARTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDA.

(Interview with Lídia do Carmo Ferreira, Luanda, May 23rd 1990.)

That took about five minutes, and no mental effort at all – but it also produced nothing worth reading, and the real work is yet to come. At the end of the book, the sprint completed, I’ll have hundreds of pages of queried, asterisked, hesitant mess, and the fun begins…

For example…

Should ‘kid’ in the first line be ‘child’ instead? More likely interviewer word?

‘apeadeiro’ isn’t the usual word – is the neutral ‘stop’ quite right?

Should I be distinguishing between the two dog references? A different Portuguese word for ‘dog’ is used for each.

Salazar – should I assume everyone will know who Salazar was (who gave his name to the dog) in the way that everyone in Portugal or Angola would certainly know? It’s not a very funny line if you don’t...

‘perdigueiro’ – I think it’s a pointer or something like it (a ‘perdigão’ is a partridge), but look up in dictionary to be sure.

‘quitandeiras’ gets a footnote in my edition – ‘Vendedeiras ambulantes’ (walking/travelling saleswomen) but footnote policy is still to be resolved in the English… I’m tempted just to keep the Portuguese word – in italics – and leave it like that; a reader’s guess here is likely to be right.

‘tumultuous’ – I don’t like this word. Can think of something that sounds better if I try.

‘bandeirola’ – a ‘bandeira’ is a flag, so some sort of little flag, for signalling, I guess? (I’m sure there’s a word in English – umm…) Dictionary again.

‘Partida’ is ‘departure’. Should he really be shouting ‘Depaaaaaaaaaarture’? ‘Depaaaaaaaaaarting’? But in English wouldn’t it be something like ‘All abooooard’?

And so on, and on.

I’ve had a lot of people e-mailing in with questions and comments in the past couple of weeks (thank you!), so I’ll use my next post to go through and try and answer some of those.

If you would like to comment on this blog, email translationblog@booktrust.org.uk

Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn