My loyalty as a translator is to both the author and the reader, but in a pinch, I try to help the reader. - William Rodarmor

[Literary translation work] has all the pleasures of creative writing, and you never have writer’s block.

Jokes [are] the bane of every trasnlator's existence.

(Speaking about his translation work of a diary by Berthe Weill) When it comes to typographical style, Berthe Weill is happily inimitable. She doesn't waste time on line breaks, so passages with a lot of dialogue look like sheets of mud. And she never met an ellipsis she didn't like. French writers use ellipses fairly often, but we avoid them in English because they... look vague... In my early drafts, I eliminated most of the ellipses, but I restored many of them later. That's because Weill's prose rhythm is closer to Machine Gun Kelly than Marcel Proust, and I realized that the ellipses help smoooth out her darting leaps from topic to topic.