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Like it or not, a translator has to take liberties. How many depends on closely the translator hews to the words of the text. I’m on the side of the … - William Rodarmor
" "Like it or not, a translator has to take liberties. How many depends on closely the translator hews to the words of the text. I’m on the side of the reader, so I’d never produce a literal, word-for-word translation, however faithful. My goal is always to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation. It should read like a book that Mathieu would have written if he were more fluent in English. So I occasionally take liberties, especially with jokes, slang, and idioms. But thanks to email, I can run my textual sins by the author before committing them to paper. Even after some forty books and screenplays, I still love doing translations.
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About William Rodarmor
William Rodarmor (born June 5, 1942) is an American journalist, editor, and translator of French literature. He is notable in the field of literary translation for having won the Albertine Prize, and the Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association.
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Additional quotes by William Rodarmor
(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.
Food makes history in France, in legend and in fact. (...) But when Charles de Gaulle radioed the French underground that the D-Day invasion was imminent, his message included the key phrase les carottes sont cuites. Literally, this means "the carrots are cooked," and metaphorically "it's all over." What other nation marches to war in the glow of beta carotene?
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