Greatest Women in Translation: Robin Myers

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

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Welcome back to our Greatest Women in Translation interview series!

This month, I talk to Robin Myers, US-born, Mexico City-based literary translator and poet, nominated by Charlotte Whittle.

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1. Could you start by telling us about your beginning in translation?

I first became fascinated with translation in my late teens. At the time, it felt like the natural amalgam of several other interests: poetry, the Spanish language, and Mexico. I was born and raised in the US, but part of my father’s family came from Mexico; I visited a couple times as a child and always wanted to spend more time here. So I studied Spanish as the means to this very specific end. I lived in the city of Oaxaca for a few months after high school, then again halfway through college. It was during those early experiences of real immersion—in the language, in a place I loved, in my first Spanish-speaking friendships, in my first forays into reading contemporary Mexican literature—that I started experimenting with translation. There was something very simple and earnest about those initial explorations: I just wanted to share what I was reading (whether in English or Spanish) with people I cared about. As innocent as this may sound to me now—or at least as far removed as it can feel from certain parts of the day-to-day grind—I still believe that the desire to translate springs from the desire to connect, period. Of course we want that! Of course we want to bring disparate words, disparate worlds together.

In any case, it wasn’t too long before my translatorly hopes and expectations came into contact with more technical realities. In college, I spent a semester studying in Buenos Aires and took a workshop with Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, a remarkable Argentine poet and translator. Ezequiel’s approach emphasized the metrical building blocks of the Spanish-language poetic tradition, and at first I railed against this focus on syllable-counting and form. But I came around, and I started to genuinely enjoy the search for poetic “solutions” within a set of formal parameters. Ezequiel’s mentorship was very important to me as I started translating in a more professional way, and we’ve both gone on to translate each other’s work over the years, which has been a great gift.

2. Besides being a translator you are also a poet. Does being a poet help as translator and vice-versa? If so, how?

It absolutely helps. Both poetry and translation (and by this I mean the translation of anything, not just poetry) are practices rooted in the materiality of language. If you write poetry or translate anything, you are in the business of dealing with words as stuff, as resources, as concrete elements you shape and combine to form certain structures and spark particular effects in the reader. Of course, in translation, you’re using language in response to—in relation to—language that already exists in the world. You’re writing (because translating is also writing) in the service of and in complicity with that language. In this sense, too, translation demands both that you saturate yourself with the original text and that you distance yourself from it. That doubleness has helped me write my own poetry, I think, at least in the sense that it’s made the experience of writing poetry much more interesting. For one thing, it’s made me more conscious of the artifice of whatever I’m doing (and I mean “artifice” not as an insult but as a fact). For the same reason, it’s also made me feel freer to experiment: to think with more curiosity and more gratitude about language as “tools” and how I might try them out. I do feel that writing poetry affects my translations as well, or my approach to translating. For example, I care a great deal about sound when I write poetry, about what happens to words when we string them together and speak them aloud, and I feel a similar need to “hear” what language does in translating both poetry and prose. That said, I don’t mean to talk about this obsession with sound as if it were strictly the domain of poetry, much less of poets, because that’s not the case at all! I’m just musing about what it feels like for me in going about things as I go about them.

3. Could you please kindly share one of your (short) poems with us?

Here’s an untitled poem (they’re all untitled) from a collection called Having, which was translated into Spanish by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg and published as Tener in Argentina, Mexico, and (soon) Spain:

You can have it.

You can have the mad dash
and the mist,
the burned tongue
and honey-slick,
the cup
intact.

The night rage, the gray dawn
forgiving you.

The train,
the track.

The soft hairs
at the nape of the neck,
the thrilled plunge
and the cast.

You can have the rest of it.

You can rest.

It will drive you mad.

You will scald your way through
the days, trying
to have all of it,

having it.

4. In this interview you gave for the Los Angeles Review of Books, you said “translation is a weird, lovely, mysterious, largely invisible relationship, both for the translator and for the translated.” Why is that?

I mean, it’s so intimate! Even if the author and translator never meet, even if the author can’t read the language she’s been translated into, even if the author’s been dead for hundreds of years. No matter what, the translator gets to—has to—inhabit the text, figure out what makes it run, spend an unholy amount of time studying how the author thinks and what she cares about.

The translator invariably has to make tradeoffs, has to figure out what can or should or under no circumstances ought to be sacrificed. It feels like a serious responsibility!

The translator is entrusted with something. With any luck, if she and the author exist on the same mortal plane and can talk to each other and choose to do so, they’ll both view the translation process as something that links them together. And they’ll both register this as an honor: the translator, honored at the invitation to engage with the text, attend to it, and deliver it somewhere new; the translated, honored to have her work—which she, too, once produced in a solitary act of faith—engaged with, attended to, and delivered in this way. But even if the translator and the author walk the earth at different moments in history, or are never in personal contact, or don’t even personally like each other very much, this relationship still exists. The devotion, the attention, the responsibility, the anxiety, the fact that the translator ultimately creates a second work of art that is both inseparable from and necessarily independent of the first: it’s all there, all the time. I find it so strange! Thrillingly strange, though.

5. Your poems are translated into other languages, including Portuguese, right? How is it like being in both sides, as translator and translated author?

It’s been very joyful and moving. Yes, poems of mine have been translated mostly into Spanish, with shorter selections into Galician, Arabic, and Portuguese. Many of these translations have emerged from long-term dialogues and friendships; several of the translators are themselves poets I’ve translated from Spanish into English. So it’s hard to be objective about it; it’s all felt like a series of long, warm conversations, marked by a sense both of deep connection and of distance. Distance in the sense that I always hope a translator will feel that the poems also belong to her, you know? In all her particularities, all her personal styles and tastes and approaches.

If I write a poem and someone else translates it—or the other way around—it’s ours.

Part of what I still find uniquely powerful about the experience of being translated into Spanish, though, is that my books have only been published in Spanish translation. Not in English, and not in my own country of origin. And since I’m based in Mexico, when I take part in poetry readings, for example, I mostly read in Spanish. Which means I’m directly and constantly identifying myself with someone else’s work as my primary form of participation. Which means I’m inhabiting and sharing theirs as much as my own.

6. Are you currently translating any books? If so, could you tell us a bit about them?

I currently have three prose projects in the works: by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Chile), there’s Cars on Fire, a wild, free-wheeling, darkly funny collection of short stories set between Chile and New York, forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2020; Animals at the End of the World, a novel by Gloria Susana Esquivel (Colombia) about a young girl growing up in her grandparents’ house in Bogotá, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in 2020; and The Restless Dead, a book of critical essays by Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico) about disappropriation, “necropolitics,” and contemporary literature. I’m also working on various poetry projects in hopes of eventually finding homes for them in English. These include work by Javier Peñalosa, Maricela Guerrero, and Isabel Zapata (three Mexican poets whose recent books take beautifully and radically different approaches to the natural world and its relationship with contemporary humans); Daniel Lipara, Claudia Masin, and Alejandro Crotto (all from Argentina); and Adalber Salas Hernández (from Venezuela).

7. Now it’s your turn to nominate our next Great Woman in Translation.

I’d like to nominate Juana Adcock, a Mexican-born, Scotland-based poet and translator. Juana translates between Spanish and English in both directions (a superpower that never ceases to amaze me!). Into English, she is the translator of Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener (with Lucy Greaves) and An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo (with Sophie Hughes). I met Juana in person only recently, although we’d been in touch for months before that, because I had the privilege of translating her poetry collection Manca into English. By the end of the process—which involved great openness, engagement, and creativity on her part—I really felt that Juana and I had become co-translators. I feel lucky to know her and learn from her in both languages!

4Mar2019

Greatest Women in Translation: Julia Sanches

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

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Welcome back to our Greatest Women in Translation interview series, dearest followers! After a long hiatus of setbacks, we’re finally back!

Please welcome this month’s interviewee, Julia Sanches, Brazilian-born literary translator from Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan into English.

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1. You’re Brazilian-born (São Paulo), but work into English (from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and French). How is that so, considering we usually translate into our mother tongue?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, lately; not about how it is I translate into English – it’s obvious to me – but about the idea of mother tongues. This rethinking was in part prompted by Esther Kim and Frances McNeill’s essays in the latest issue of In Other Words. In “We May Have All Come on Different Ships, But We’re in the Same Boat Now: Why We Should Not Label Translators as ‘L2’ or ‘Non-Native,’” McNeill interrogates the validity of the L1/L2 designations (L1 being “the language you think in, you feel in, you know best, whereas L2 is the language you aspire to speak fluently”), while in “Inheritance from Mother,” Kim points to the troubling lack of heritage speakers in the professional world of literary translation, and offers ways to address this.

In her essay, McNeill offers three examples that belie the L1/L2 dichotomy and interrogates whether or not one should consider the person in question an L2 speaker. Here’s my example: A person born in Brazil to Brazilian parents moves to the United States with her parents when she is three-months old. She is dropped into English-only education and quickly comes to speak English fluently. She speaks Portuguese at home and with her extended family in Brazil; they call her gringa. Eight years later, she moves with her parents to Mexico City and enters a bilingual school, where classes are imparted both in Spanish and English. She becomes fluent in Spanish – they call her güera – retains her English and continues to speak Portuguese at home. Five years later, she moves back to the United States with her family, where she attends a monolingual (English) public school. One year later, she moves with her family to Switzerland, where she attends an international school (read: where students’ common language is English). She later completes her higher education in Scotland (English) and Spain (Spanish). What is this person’s (you got it, it’s me) L1/L2?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘mother tongue’ as ‘one’s native language; a first language.’ So, in that respect, Portuguese is my mother tongue – it is the first language I picked up at home, from my mother, who always insisted that I should never lose it – although the notion of languages being native (i.e. inherent to, innate, naturally becoming, again according to the OED) to anyone baffles me a little; our capacity for language may be innate, but its execution has, in my experience, been very much learned.

What’s more: I’m a citizen of Brazil and of no other country. Although I lived in Europe for fifteen years, it was never anywhere that made citizenship an easy path for me. After about thirteen years in the United States, I can finally apply for citizenship, though I’m not sure I’ll ever feel American. I could uncomplicate my identity as a translator by obviating the fact that I’m Brazilian, but what’s the fun in that?

2. On your website, you say you are soon-to-be chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild. Could you tell us more about it?

We’re in the process of creating a Translators Group within the Authors Guild, following the model of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association in the UK. Generally speaking, there’s an industry standard for author contracts and terms here in the U.S. This standard wasn’t arrived at out of the kindness of publishers’ hearts, but was fought for. The idea behind creating a Translators Group is to support work to establish similar industry standards for translators. Alex Zucker and Jessica Cohen have been working with the Authors Guild on a model contract that would spell out certain contractual terms that might seem impenetrable to some translators, among other things.

Another thing we’re exploring is establishing translator communities within the Authors Guild’s regional chapters around the country, to help better share information about contracts and other working conditions. The Authors Guild is the only organization in the U.S. with in-house lawyers providing legal services to authors and translators, and they’re already huge advocates for translation and translators. The idea is to focus this effort.

3. Last year, the Brazilian publishing house Companhia das Letras invited five Brazilian literary translators to talk about their professional trajectory in their blog in celebration of the International Translation Day, and you were among them. You wrote about your experience translating The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins’ first book. On Twitter, you said you wrote the blog post in English and then translated it into Portuguese, but didn’t like the self-translation process. Do you remember why?

I sound completely unlike myself in Portuguese. It was like giving voice to a stilted and awkward-sounding stranger who happened to also be called Julia Sanches.

4. You retweeted a quote by Javier Cercas at the Edinburgh Book Festival, “Translators are like psychoanalysts. They know you really, really, really well. I’m really scared of them.” On your post for Companhia das Letras (above), you said the relationship between translators and “their” authors is disturbing, unbalanced, partial and voyeuristic (curiosity: were these the words you originally used in your English version?). Could you elaborate more on the relationship between the author and their translator?

First off: in English, it was “lopsided, unreciprocated, and often hair-raisingly voyeuristic.” Interesting…

What can I say but that: when I translate – especially when the book in question is such an engrossing challenge as Martins’ collection, something so distant from my lived experience – I get a tad obsessive. If you were to decontextualize my behavior, it might seem stalkerish, even. I read everything I can about the book, the author, I read the book itself a gazillion times, both in English and in Portuguese (and I’d probably read them in other languages, if it were available to me). I follow the author on Twitter if I can, and Instagram (yikes). I draw connections between what they post about music (etc) and the musical (and other) references in the book. Often, I go to bed with a translation problem at the back of my mind – sometimes even at the forefront – and wake up fretting about it, too. On good days, I’ll have a solution by the time I’m at my computer.

It’s a bit like crawling into and living in another person’s skin for a long stretch of time. Or spying on a neighbor from across the street. You know near everything about them and often they don’t know the first thing about you. It’s a little bit creepy – in a totally harmless way.

5. You are one of the organizers of the And Other Stories’ Portuguese Reading Group. The 2018 group had, for the first ever, an all-Brazilian reading list (including one translated by yourself). Could you tell us a bit more about how it works? Are there any plans for another edition in the near future?

And Other Stories’ Reading Groups are a rather innovative and ingenious way for the publisher (AOS) to find overlooked gems from other languages to publish in English. The idea is to put in the hands of readers some of the sleuthing, reading, and evaluating that goes into figuring out what to publish. On my side: I email a bunch of Portuguese readers and ask if they’d like to participate; then reach out to agents and ask for materials (hard copies usually, no one really likes reading on screens); we meet, in person, if possible, but usually over Skype, to discuss our impressions, which I then memorialize and share with the publishers. Rinse and repeat. It’s quite fun. Victor Meadowcroft, who will be heading the UK group, and I are currently choosing which titles to read and discuss in the fall. You should join us!

6. You write really well! I’m truly impressed and in love with your writings. Haven’t you ever thought of venturing into being an author yourself?

Oh, gosh. Thank you! Writing fills me with a very particular and acute anxiety, so I tend to avoid it. Translating ticks that box for me, whatever that means. It’s thrilling, plus, I get to hang out in and between various languages, which is where I feel most at home.

7. I will take advantage of your inside view into Brazilian literature and ask for recommendations. What books do you personally recommend, translated or not?

I’ve recently finished reading Emilio Fraia’s Sebastopol, which I deeply enjoyed. The prose is just my style, limpid and charged. He’s also quite masterful at creating suspense, at leaving things unsaid, at giving voice and weight to silences.

8. I could keep asking you a ton of questions, but I’ll leave you for now. So now it’s your turn to nominate our next Great Woman in Translation.

I’d like to nominate Charlotte Whittle, an acrobatic translator from Spanish whose recent projects include Norah Lange’s People in the Room and Jorge Comensal’s The Mutations. She is also one of the editors of Cardboard House Press and periodically holds cartonera workshops. Aside from all this, Charlotte is an amazing storyteller; she’s got an eye for the most off-kilter and delightful details and remembers them, too. We keep each other sane and safe from bouts of imposter syndrome. I think of her as a co-conspirator.

6Jan2016

Greatest Women in Translation: Allison Wright

Posted in Interview series by Carol's Adventures in Translation

Happy New Year, dear readers! And welcome back to our (belated) Greatest Women in Translation series! I just couldn’t find the time between the holidays and the hectic beginning of the year to post this month’s interview. But, as I always say, better late than never, right?

I hope you enjoy our new interviewee, the great Allison Wright, nominated by Sabine Lammersdorf.

Welcome, Allison!

Thank you, Caroline, for the interesting questions which make up this interview. They certainly gave me food for thought! I do need to mention that I still have a problem with the adjective “great” being applied to me. Perhaps we should edit that to read “most verbose” instead?

1. You were born in Kitwe, Zambia. At the age of 2, your family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. When you were 8, your family moved again to Harare, Zimbabwe, where you completed your schooling. After that, you spent 4 years at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa, where you received a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and a postgraduate Honours degree in French. After your studies, you returned to Zimbabwe, where you remained for the next 22 years working. Finally, in 2008, you moved to Portugal, where you are based now. Wow! That’s quite a lot of moving about. What made you move to Portugal after living for so long in Africa? How did this affect your translation career?

The migration pattern described above is very common for all manner of people from southern Africa; the resultant “diaspora” has spread all over the world. Although my partner of 28 years is Portuguese, I was the one who wanted to move to Portugal because when on holiday here two years before we arrived for good, I felt a strong affinity with the semi-rural village in which I now live, despite only having a handful of Portuguese words in my pocket at the time.

The other motivation was one of survival. Various decisions made and policies pursued by the Government of Zimbabwe, particularly in the ten years preceding my departure, caused a series of successive economic crises each one more severe than the last. The day before I left Zimbabwe in early October 2008, the annual rate of inflation posted at one investment bank I used to visit often was 231 million percent – as if anyone can even conceive of such a figure! Less than five weeks later, the country reached levels of true hyperinflation with an estimated rate of inflation of 79.6 billion percent, comparable with rates experienced under Germany’s Weimar Republic.

We emigrated a mere seven weeks after making the decision to do so. I am a British citizen (one of my favourite jokes is that if I can be British, then anyone can) and my partner is a citizen of Portugal, so moving to an EU country was relatively straightforward. We sold almost everything we had and managed to buy our air tickets and pay for the shipping of a few treasured possessions. Savings (entirely from translation work) equivalent to six or seven months’ worth of living expenses in Portugal and no real idea of how I was going to make things work formed the basis of our fresh start in a new country shortly before I turned 44. I should add that I love living in Portugal and now consider it my home.

As a result of the move, my translation career came to a halt. The bulk of my clients were NGOs active in development cooperation in Zimbabwe and the SADC region. Their various bilateral and multilateral agreements stated that locally or regionally resident personnel had to be used for “support services” of which translation was considered one. Simultaneously, my other large regular client, headquartered in France, experienced a radical organisational restructuring and I was advised by the new managing director that alternative arrangements had been made for their translation requirements.

Nevertheless, within two months of arriving in Portugal I had registered with the tax authorities as a freelance translator – which, coincidentally, is what my passport said I was – and have been bound by law ever since to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, something which keeps my somewhat non-conformist self in check.

2. You are a member of the recently created APTRAD (Portuguese Association of Translators and Interpreters). Why did you become an APTRAD member?

I have been an accredited member (Fr-En and De-En translation) of SATI, the South African Translators’ Institute since 2001, having joined as a member the year before that. Last year I was honoured to be invited to mark French to English accreditation examinations for SATI, which so far has not been an onerous task. While in Zimbabwe, living 2,000 kilometres from SATI’s headquarters made it difficult to participate in the Institute’s activities, which I would have done had I lived closer.

Until APTRAD was formally constituted in February 2014, there was no comparable association for translators and interpreters in Portugal. All seven of APTRAD’s founders are themselves professional translators of good repute. Its President, Paula Pinto Ribeiro, has long had the dream to put in place a dynamic organisation which assists new translators and interpreters in integrating into the market and provides a platform which will allow issues affecting existing professionals to be addressed more effectively through concerted action. I became a member because I believe that membership of such associations not only gives one credibility as a professional but also enables one to make a contribution to the profession, if only at the level of paying the membership fee. Apart from that, I agree with the objects stated in APTRAD’s Articles of Association and, perhaps more importantly, subscribe to its Code of Ethics.

APTRAD has already held awareness-raising presentations at all the leading universities in Portugal, embarked on a training series in Portuguese, and is currently running its first mentoring programme which is set to last three months in which 8 mentors and 9 mentorees are participating.

There is one other reason why I joined APTRAD which is equally compelling: I like every single Portuguese translator I have met in person and a good many I have met online. They are a great bunch of people who more often than not encourage each other, and perhaps this is what has motivated me to take part in the mentoring programme, and to torture APTRAD members in the Algarve with my less than perfect Portuguese as their local APTRAD representative. In that respect, I am quite an odd choice!

3. As I was compiling these questions, APTRAD announced that you will be one of the speakers at its first international conference to be held in June 2016. Could you tell us a bit about the topic you will talk about (Collaboration Essentials)?

Other than saying the presentation focuses on examining a people-centred approach to clients and others who populate our technology-driven world, I would prefer to keep the actual content under wraps until the conference itself. After the conference, I shall be happy to make the content freely available.

4. Speaking of collaboration, you mention on one of your blog posts that you think collaboration is key? How and why?

Perhaps I should preface my answer by saying that the job of a translator is to translate. Because it is our job, it is up to us to develop our translation competence constantly. This is a professional responsibility we owe to ourselves and to our clients. It is also something which requires hours of private study, private reading of a host of material from a variety of sources, paying attention to our environment (such as that strange new advert on the side of a bus, for example) as well as a good deal of serious thought. I am not referring to continuous professional development (CPD) here; I am speaking about the honing of our translation skills alone and in private.

Collaboration, by definition, is not a solitary activity. It is simply working with someone, as opposed to working for someone. I have a rather broad definition of a collaborator, and include in it anyone you work with who helps you achieve your objective which, one would hope, is to translate accurately, well, and by the deadline given for the assignment, whether a one-hour rush job or a large project lasting several weeks or months.

At the level of the translator-client relationship (and I include agencies under the term “client”), I am of the view that despite huge advances in technology, the most effective approach in acquiring and keeping clients is one where you focus on the human aspect. Connecting with people and focusing on working with them to achieve what becomes your mutual objective (getting the job done) seems to me to engender a greater degree of cooperation among all those involved than if you do not. This interpersonal interaction – which often has very little to do with the job of translation itself – is often the driving force behind the generation of more work, and better paid work, as a result of the closer understanding between the translator and the client.

I also dealt with the matter of collaboration slightly differently in a guest blog on Catherine Translates written in May 2012, although the underlying ideas are the same. As you can see, the “how” part of your question has no single, easy answer.

The “why” is simpler to answer: Collaboration is key because it improves the quality of your translations and, as intimated above, creates opportunities for further collaboration – also known as “more work”.

5. As already mentioned, you also have a blog, That elusive pair of jeans, where, as Sabine Lammersdorf said, you write eloquently. And I do have to agree with her. I really enjoy reading your posts. How do you think blogging can help translators?

There is no doubt in my mind that blogging on translation matters does help other translators. I have gained many insights over the years from content published by other translators, and regularly set aside part of my weekend to enjoy the latest offerings. There is a wealth of information which one can absorb. Reading translation blogs helps us stay abreast of events within our profession and developments in translation-related technology and offers a searchable space for the exchange of ideas which is less ephemeral than Facebook, for example. I especially love the comments section of active blogs, and would encourage more translators to comment more freely. It is an excellent way for translators to get to know each other.

How blogging benefits the translators who do blog is different for each individual. For me, blogging helps me clarify precisely what I think about something.

Blogging is a form of relaxation for me; the taming of stray thoughts which occur but have to be temporarily ignored when chasing translation deadlines. I find it therapeutic! That elusive pair of jeans was never intended purely as a translation blog. My chief intention when blogging is to write things of my own, as a corollary to the writing one must do as part the translation process. Occasionally, I find myself writing about translation matters, but I do not fit into the category of person who finds joy in writing blogs entitled, “50 Ways to Leave your Lover” or similar − and indeed, I find such blogs hard to read, although they are useful to many readers as checklists.

Since November 2014, I have had a second blog on my translation website where content is restricted to translation matters and the style is slightly more formal. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I never follow a blogging schedule, and only write when I feel like it!

6. Everywhere on your blog and website you clearly state your copyright. Have you ever had any problem related to copyright? Why do you think it is important to clearly state it?

The chief stumbling block in discussing copyright and its nefarious cousin, plagiarism, is that people tend to think of these two as abstract concepts. Abstract they are not. Far from it; they are real. Asserting copyright is, as the word suggests, a right. Infringing or violating someone else’s copyright is a crime. Plagiarism is an infringement of copyright.

I wrote a blog early in the morning on 16 November 2014 publicising a scam concerning a bogus directory of translators created by perpetrators stealing 43,158 translator profiles from ProZ. It contained the following words of mine:

“There is no such thing as a cheap translation. It may be cheap, but it won’t be a translation.”

Because my words intentionally followed the cadence of the now common saying “that there is no such things as a free lunch”, and therefore sounded familiar to me, I was careful before publishing my blog to search various word strings to ensure that no one had written this before. No one had. Less than an hour later, a young translator in a Portuguese-language translators’ group on Facebook posted these two sentences of mine without inverted commas, without attribution to me, and without any link or reference to the blog in question, and certainly without my permission. Just those two sentences in a Facebook “update” bearing her name; nothing else. I called her out on it straight away quite plainly and said that I had just written those words on my blog and she should acknowledge her source. In response, she was unapologetic, asked me how I knew they were my original words (!), embarked on a stream of uncalled-for rudeness, and refused outright to acknowledge that she had done anything wrong despite other group members urging her to do so, and despite the several “chances” I gave her, as well as providing her with numerous definitions of plagiarism cited from authoritative sources on the web. Her utter lack of respect for copyright (and for me, I suppose) resulted in her being barred from the group. It is since that day that I have clearly stated my copyright in more than one place on my blog.

I have also come across plagiarism in translation. The first time was when I took on a “rephrasing” assignment, ostensibly to improve the English of the writer, whose native tongue was Arabic and who had written an article intended for submission to an academic journal. He had, it would appear, received his doctorate based on a thesis (in Arabic) on a similar topic. Since I am a stickler for correct terminology, I was once again methodically searching word strings of the English text which I had rephrased to ensure that the edited version conformed to standard terminology within the subject field concerned. I repeatedly encountered academic articles by one particular writer in English. Whole paragraphs were strikingly similar, if not lifted wholesale. The only non-plagiarised part of the article was the section containing the Arabic author’s own research data. I phoned the agency. The project manager was as unconcerned as the end client, evidently, about this problem, and instructed me to “change the English text some more” so that one could not tell that the text was basically the same as the original author’s. I refused on principle, and sent the unfinished mess back straight away. I was paid a token for my troubles. That was the one and only time I ever worked with that agency. It was long before I had a website or a blog. My first website (July 2011) included a section on plagiarism in my terms and conditions as does my current one.

I find plagiarism abhorrent and would certainly defend my copyright were I ever to discover that it had been violated. I respect everyone else’s copyright, and am careful not to misquote. It is not too much to ask others to do the same.

7. I really enjoyed learning more about you on your LinkedIn profile. You mention extra information in your job descriptions that makes it interesting to read. For example, I especially liked that you mention an experience as a laundry worker, explaining the reason for that (lack of the Portuguese language knowledge when you moved to Portugal) and saying that it confirmed what you had always known – that translation was your thing. Do you think the way you present yourself online helps you be noticed and differentiate yourself from other translators?

I had to mention that jolly laundry, since it accounts for 18 months of my life, and it is unwise to leave great gaps on one’s CV! The fact is that I knew from the age of 15 that I definitely wanted to be a translator. LinkedIn is useful, as it serves as a repository for the details of my corporate career (laundry work apart, I mean!) spanning 22 years. I worked in-house as a secretary and translator for three years in my first job, and for 20 of those 22 years, I worked part-time as a freelance translator. The term “part-time” is somewhat of a misnomer, since soon after starting to freelance, I was frequently clocking over 40 hours of translation work per week in addition to my full-time job, and in 1995 and 1996, weekly translation hours in excess of 60 were not unusual. I gave up playing golf, which I had been doing since the age of 12, because I preferred translation. I suppose I can identify with that freelance translator definition of a weekend: two working days before Monday.

I think a presence online is necessary for most freelance translators, although I can think of dozens for whom online visibility would not generate them additional work nor is it desirable, given the highly confidential work that they do.

I am not particularly concerned about whether I am “noticed” online or not, and apart from sharing blogs I write, I have never adopted a targeted marketing strategy online to acquire clients. When other translators do share a blog of mine, I am gratified to the extent that they have found something in that blog worth sharing.

That I am to some extent visible online does, I believe, assist in verifying my bona fides when potential clients follow the links I supply them in job applications, and so on. Where perhaps I do come across as a little different from many is that I try to present myself as honestly as possible rather than portray a strictly “professional” image − hence the always very up-to-date photographs, due for across the board renewal soon. What you see is definitely what you get, except in real life I tend to swear more and laugh more.

As far as differentiating myself from other translators is concerned, I think this is more properly the ambit of my clients, and I would hope that they base their opinion on the translations and other work that I do for them and the manner in which I communicate with them.

While obviously and justifiably I do put my best foot forward when trying to acquire a potential client, as does everybody else, I do not see myself as being particularly competitive, since I honestly believe that there is abundant work for everyone. We simply have to find it!

8. You translated Vine Atlas of Spain and Portugal – History, Terroir and Ampelography from German into English (125,000 words) which later appeared on the Vine to Wine Circle portal together with additional material (over 80,000 words) from Portuguese into English. Could you tell us briefly how you found this experience?

Demanding, interesting, exhausting, exhilarating and extremely rewarding! I translated those 125,000 German words without the use of a CAT tool, you know. Although I did the Portuguese to English translation in Trados one year later, I had no TM and only De-En glossaries of my own in Excel to help me. It was also a strange experience: during the four months actually spent doing the De-En translation, I only ever dreamt in Portuguese; I went to sleep thinking in Portuguese and woke up the same way. As soon as I was awake, the German and English parts of my brain revved up to full throttle (except when reading articles in Spanish – not one of my languages! – in the course of research). Through that experience I also learned that I cannot translate for 8 hours or more per day for longer than 23 consecutive days without a break, and I have not tried to break that record since. It is good to know your limitations.

9. Now it’s your turn. I’m curious to know who your role model is and who you have nominated for our next Great Woman in Translation.

Well, my true role model is neither a woman nor a translator, but a former boss in the corporate world with whom I had the very great privilege of working for four years, and with whom I maintained a friendship after his retirement until he died in 2006. He also swore and laughed a lot.

I will play by your rules, though, Caroline!

There is a female Brazilian Portuguese to English translator based in California whom I have admired for many years and who has graciously accepted my nomination. I gather from various private enquiries I have made of several colleagues that she is little known among the younger generation of translators. I admire her for the sheer volume of the body of work she has translated; her significant contribution academically and in practise to the translation profession; her sound, measured advice in ProZ forum discussions and elsewhere for many years ; and her tenacity and stamina in the face of enormous challenges in her life. Above all, I admire her for her crisp, honest and evocative writing style in her published memoirs, “Finding My Invincible Summer”. Her name is Muriel Vasconscellos.

Thank you so much for accepting Sabine’s nomination and my invitation to answer the interview for our blog series. It was a great pleasure hosting you here, since you are such an avid reader and commenter of the blog. I loved to get to know you a bit better! 🙂

I wish an amazing 2016 to you and all my dear readers! 🙂