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**Dfvgthyju** · 07-05-2008, 11:16 PM

I met Warburton once, almost 30 years ago. He was then a very kind and unassuming man looking forward to his retirement. He worked at the Helsinki Finland-Swedish publishing house Schildts, which did admittedly supplement his income, but how much of a sinecure this job there was I do not know. I get the feeling they let him have long sabbaticals, as they knew he was a key translator.

As for the Page 276 Syndrome, I suffered it once a few years ago, as I think I related somewhere on this website. After translating a 300-page postmodernist novel from Estonian, something which not all that many people in Western Europe do, I showed my translation rather proudly to a Dutchman, himself a very well respected translator into Dutch. He knew little about Estonian literature, which is only to be expected, but after flicking through the book out of politeness for a few minutes, he espied... a Mistake!

This was on Page 43! I had written that the Clouzet film mentioned on that page was called La Salaire de la Peur. But woe is me, I had committed a dreadful error! The film was in fact called Le Salaire de la Peur, as the word "salaire" is a masculine noun.

What a coincidence! I watched that film earlier this week. In American, it is called The Wages of Fear.

What, if it isn't terribly off-topic, made you want to go into translating literature for a living? It's such an unusual vocation. I used to work with a technical translator at a previous job, English-to-Spanish, what a headache for her! We would write the narrative and produce the graphics in English, but Spanish sometimes takes several more words to say the same thing, yet they expected her document to look the same as mine and fill the same space. And then there would be the e-mails from her asking me to describe what some of the technical jargon meant because the cute little name for it in English was pretty meaningless in Spanish. Then we hired a second translator and the great translation wars began and both argued their cases for what they felt was the best translation for the same information. A simple example -- boys and girls. Ninos and ninas, or muchachos and muchachas? I can't imagine the difficulties encountered when you move from the simple documents we produced to something like a post-modernist novel.

07-05-2008, 11:16 PM	#4
Dfvgthyju Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 548 Senior Member	I met Warburton once, almost 30 years ago. He was then a very kind and unassuming man looking forward to his retirement. He worked at the Helsinki Finland-Swedish publishing house Schildts, which did admittedly supplement his income, but how much of a sinecure this job there was I do not know. I get the feeling they let him have long sabbaticals, as they knew he was a key translator. As for the Page 276 Syndrome, I suffered it once a few years ago, as I think I related somewhere on this website. After translating a 300-page postmodernist novel from Estonian, something which not all that many people in Western Europe do, I showed my translation rather proudly to a Dutchman, himself a very well respected translator into Dutch. He knew little about Estonian literature, which is only to be expected, but after flicking through the book out of politeness for a few minutes, he espied... a Mistake! This was on Page 43! I had written that the Clouzet film mentioned on that page was called La Salaire de la Peur. But woe is me, I had committed a dreadful error! The film was in fact called Le Salaire de la Peur, as the word "salaire" is a masculine noun. What a coincidence! I watched that film earlier this week. In American, it is called The Wages of Fear. What, if it isn't terribly off-topic, made you want to go into translating literature for a living? It's such an unusual vocation. I used to work with a technical translator at a previous job, English-to-Spanish, what a headache for her! We would write the narrative and produce the graphics in English, but Spanish sometimes takes several more words to say the same thing, yet they expected her document to look the same as mine and fill the same space. And then there would be the e-mails from her asking me to describe what some of the technical jargon meant because the cute little name for it in English was pretty meaningless in Spanish. Then we hired a second translator and the great translation wars began and both argued their cases for what they felt was the best translation for the same information. A simple example -- boys and girls. Ninos and ninas, or muchachos and muchachas? I can't imagine the difficulties encountered when you move from the simple documents we produced to something like a post-modernist novel.
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