In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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When looking at a translation, how much weight do you assign to the consideration (which militates toward preserving as much intact as possible) of having the story open a window into the soul of the country that produced it, and how much to the notion that it really should be playing on a level field with all the other stories originally written in English (which suggests rewriting the story nearly from scratch)?

Ultimately, I think that translations need to work just as well in English as any story that was written originally in English, but it ALSO may need to do what you’re saying–opening that window into the soul of the country that produced it. But that’s just for certain stories; some stories are going to be very much a product of the place that they were written in, whereas others will work well in translation, and not feel particularly foreign. For the stories where the culture is critical to the story, I think it’s definitely a difficult balancing act, to capture those elements that will convey the cultural differences to the foreign reader and yet still make the prose familiar enough to the reader that it is accessible. I’m not really sure how to offer advice for doing any of that, but I think those are the goals you need to shoot for.

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