: Re: Should I translate my own writings into a second language I also know well? Nabokov was very discouraged when he translated his Lolita into Russian. And he spent half a year on it. So should

@Deb2945533

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I doubt anyone knows what you wanted to say better than yourself. Even the most skilled translator can miss some fine points you wanted to express. As someone who has seen quite a number of bad translations, I'd never let anyone translate it into a language I know well enough to translate myself. To help, maybe, to edit and give a hand with some subtler points of language, yes, but the whole translation, no.

I'm reading a book right now in English and was surprised to find it in the bookstore translated into Croatian, so I flipped through it and I literally shuddered. It wasn't that it was badly translated, per se, but since it's written in first person, the voice was completely different. It wasn't the same character anymore. I know some things get lost in translation, but this felt like a completely different character was telling the same story. Not to mention that some names were Croationized while most didn't. You just don't do that, you either do it all or none at all.

There are just as much of bad translators out there as there are good ones, it's a lottery which one you would ran into. The ones that have actually lived in a foreign country and are truly fluent in that foreign language are really rare. Translator also needs to have a flair for writing, because it's not all literal translation, sometimes you need to be creative to translate phrases and sentence structures that don't even exist in the other language, and still keep the original meaning in the original voice and style. It's not straightforward. So who better to do it than the original author?

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