When you pick up an English edition of a foreign language book, you have to rely on the good intentions and skill of the translator. But can they be trusted?

Serious readers will have heard the term “unreliable narrator”. Put simply, can the person or character relating the story you’re reading be trusted. Is the narrator the author, and therefore outside of the story in a sense, or is she or he a character with their own axe to grind? In short, can the narrator of the story be trusted?

One of the issues I’ve encountered through the various literature courses I’ve attended in recent years is what I might call “unreliable translators”. If you don’t speak the original language in which a book was written, you have to assume that the translation you’re reading has done it justice. Has the translator, in other words, been true to the original? Another way of putting this might be: “what makes a good translation?”, which has echoes of “what makes a good short story?” or “what makes a good film?”.

I think that phrase, “true to the original”, needs to be unpacked. Does it mean literally accurate, or true to the spirit of the writer’s intentions? Or both, if that is possible. Without wishing to sound too pious, I do believe that, as the reader has to put their trust in the translator, the translator has a sacred duty to deserve that trust.

It seems to me that the work of a translator is quite difficult, because several things have to be weighed up. A literal translation of, say, The Canterbury Tales might be technically accurate, but fail to reflect the joy of the language and the humour.

In these courses I mentioned, and my reading outside the courses, I’ve encountered a translation of a Russian short story in which the text in one passage described the exact opposite of what had happened, a modern rendering of a Russian novel which somehow managed to excise all the beauty of the language of the original (as found in a now out-of-print translation), and a translation of a French short story in which the translator took it upon herself to delete the passages she thought were too ribald, or perhaps too “near the mark” for the censors at the time.

This is a gross breach of trust. It’s almost equivalent to someone translating or reading a letter to the intended recipient but leaving out or changing the bits they felt were unsuitable. That’s not the translator’s job. They are in the role of a messenger, from the author to the reader. If they don’t like what the author has written, they can pass the job on to someone else, and go off and write their own story!