 Hello everyone. So this video is kind of a shout out to all of you fiction translators out there because I'm not a fiction translator. I translate mainly financial and legal documents and stuff like that. I'll do some websites marketing but I don't really do fiction and the main reason is that I'm scared of doing fiction and I find that to be a fiction translator you have to be quite strong. So I just want to salute all the fiction translators out there for being able to do it. And let me get a bit into it. The reason why is that when you do translations like what I do, financial translations, there's usually always a way to translate something, right? You know, there's a certain way to say account konto and you know how to translate it. Even if it's something difficult, there's a glossary and you can look it up. So these are very complicated terms of course but you can always find out what they are or ask around and there's a certain way to do it. Even when there's more than one translation like the word statuto in Italian could be statute or it could be bylaws or it could be articles of incorporation and but there too it depends on the context. So you just look okay what's the context? Hmm oh it's this context over here okay it'll be statute or articles of incorporation or whatever and so it's there's very little guesswork and there's usually a precise way to translate something. You find this in all technical texts which should be more difficult and very often they're very difficult but there's always a precise way to translate something so in my view that's easier. Even if you can't look something up you can ask around and find out what the correct term is because there is a correct term. With fiction there is no correct term. You need to figure it out yourself and there's so much gray area that you really need to you need to be sure of yourself and strong enough to be able to translate something. Someone gives you a work of fiction I don't care if it's a short story if it's a novel a novella if it's a children's story a horror story whatever you need to understand not only what the words are and translate them but you need to understand the whole context who the who the target audience is the feel of the book and be able to transpose that and if someone you know it is supposed to sound really smart someone else is supposed to sound really dumb someone else supposed to sound old-fashioned stuff like that you kind of have to pick up on that because that's how they need to sound in your translation right. Obviously this doesn't always happen and I think everyone who reads in more than one language has noticed maybe here are their translations that seem a bit off but by and large if someone knows what they're doing with the translation has it looked over they want to make sure that you have that same feel and if you're a fiction translator and if you're worth your salt then you know how to do this and so that's why I salute you and I find it very interesting because it is not easy to do I know for certain people like Umberto Eco if you read anything by Umberto Eco you can feel safe reading it in any language because he worked very closely with all these translators trying to convey the same meaning of what he wanted to convey in the original so he was able to do this I think quite well I've read him in both languages you know but very often the authors don't do this if you have a question you can usually ask them but there's a lot of work you need to do yourself and you need to be strong if you want to rip apart whatever the author wrote and then rewrite it in your own way because you decide in your language it sounds better in this way and there's so many examples of this well some examples are like between Italian and English you know the language as I know and a certain thing if you if in English if you say someone's an entrepreneur the image that's conveyed is someone you know the guy tinkering in his garage and trying to come up with the next big thing or some guy being all techy and doing stuff you know these are the entrepreneurs and so it has that feel that certain you see that type of person they act in a certain way something you know that's how you see the entrepreneur so the translation for entrepreneur in Italian is imprenditore but if you say imprenditore in Italy then and it's changing a bit now but usually frankly if you say imprenditore it has a very different feel it's usually the guy who does business but he's got connections and he's kind of just on this side of the law let's say and uh very cunning and kind of that is one thing he's like I'll take care of it don't worry don't worry don't worry but he's not your average mom-and-pop shop type of guy or a guy who works in a factory even a you know decent family-owned business usually imprenditore you use it to mean this guy who's sort of doing his own thing and uh it's kind of shady but so how do you translate entrepreneur then what if you're talking about the techy guys you translate as imprenditore or some other way as I said this is changing now just because people like Mark Zuckerberg and all those are constantly being referred to as entrepreneurs so it is changing a bit but it is kind of hard um another example actually would be smart smart very often is translated as in Italian as furable but when you use furable you don't mean smart he usually means someone who's more wily I guess that's smart in fact imprenditore many times is furable it's smart but trying to find ways around the system and you know trying to uh again be more cunning trying to uh find a shortcut to figure out what's going on and cut corners is that's the sense of furable which is completely different from smart smart you use it for a mathematician or science scientist or something like that which you would never use furable for you use intelligent intelligent anyway um just to point out these differences in translation that to me I mean can become crazy you have so many words and each one of these words can convey something different and you have to try to convey this feel and so I just salute you fiction writers actually before I sign off one other example which I find very interesting that I read about was James Joyce James Joyce obviously he's an Irish writer and he would write often about people going to the west coast west coast of Ireland going back to the west coast they're thinking about the west and this doesn't just mean thinking about the west coast or even just the west coast of Ireland in Ireland the difference is apparently that the west coast is a lot more traditional has a lot less English influence people are a lot more Irish there and while in the east coast they're kind of more British and more influenced by what's going on on the English side of things so when James Joyce says oh they're thinking about the west coast or they want to go back west it has a very specific meaning it means basically trying to thinking about their roots trying to get back to those or a tradition and stuff like that how do you convey that in a translation even in English it's not it's not a translation but to like a population to an audience who's not from Ireland someone from the US they won't know that say the west coast in the US it means LA but you say the west coast of Ireland even then you're like okay you know you don't you don't think about all these things usually and so if you have to translate into a different language forget it so that's I find this fascinating by the way because then how do you translate that even from one even in the same language and then but it definitely pops up when you're translating between different languages and it can be very hard to convey this certain feeling so I just wanted to salute all of you fiction translators because I feel like you're stronger than I am with what you're doing I don't know that I could handle that and so keep doing a good job and that's all I have to say I'll see you next time thanks bye