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Literary Translation

"Translation is at best an echo."
(George Borrow)

"To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author."
(Paul Goodman)

Literature is almost as old as mankind. There were dark centuries where monasteries were the only "lighthouses of culture" preserving lots of valuable books and knowledge for the future generations, through translating them or simply by writing them down.

There was a swerve in history (the Enlightenment) when people started to feel the need to read books (most of all the Holy Bible, the greatest bestseller ever) in their own mother tongues.

Many pieces of art of high artistic value could have not reached wider audiences and certain strata of the society without the dedicated poets and writers who decided to "replant" them into their own languages. Most of the readers would have been deprived from enjoying the art of Shakespeare, Hugo, Goethe or Rimbaud without these literary translations.

Literary translation supports cultural exchange. This type of translation activity is the furthest from mechanically finding the linguistic equivalences and requires a whack of creativity. A good literary translator is a writer or poet himself. What needs to be conceived by the translator is the message of the source text through its symbols and metaphors, then this message has to be recreated (maybe with completely different wording) in the target language. The rhythm, the dynamics, the tone also has to be preserved. In this segment of translation services, it is not a problem if the translator does not stick so much to the original text. There have been excellent literary translators who spoke the language that they translated form only at a basic level. All they needed was a rough translation done by someone who had no poetic inspiration but good skills in the given foreign language, then they used this rough translation as a "primary commodity" and with the help of their wonderful imagination, they found the right words to bewitch the readers and made them appreciate an excellent artist from a different culture.

That is why it is important that the good literary translators have a profound knowledge of the culture out of which they are translating, so that they can understand even the slightest hints. (Throughout history there were periods when oppressive systems put strict restraint on poets and writers so the only way they could express their opinions was through figurative meaning – similes, metaphors, or allegories.)

Today, literary translation has also become a business. Several book translations are done with very tight deadlines and manuscripts are not proofread properly. All this affect the quality of the output. Business Team Translations will provide you, in a timely manner, with the best literary translations by working with the best translators who not only possess the right words but also the heart, spirit and soul to create far more than a new piece of paper: a new piece of art.