[Eric]

'Scuse me, I note the original posting by Nnyhav about the art of translation, but how many of you who discuss on this thread actually do literary translation on a regular basis, and if so, from which languages into which other[s]?

Why I ask, is because I am involved almost every day translating prose, and more rarely, poetry. Over the past week or so, I have translated a couple of thousand words of Swedish literary prose (novel excerpt), and several hundred from an Estonian novella. Into English, my mother-tongue.

What puzzles me about the discussion here is that there's a lot of juggling with words such as "competency", "craft", "coloration", "scholarship", "parsing", "transposing", "connotations", and so on, with some admission that you can indeed read, say, Latin or Russian. But what is discussed seems indeed to be nit-picking (Cavalier Bizarre) mixed in with subtle one-upmanship and put-downs, trying to catch out those who are not au fait with the latest buzz word.

I really do wonder, given the fact that only 3% of books in Britain and the USA are translations, whether people wouldn't be more gainfully employed doing some translation themselves, and holding up the fruits to the criticism of peers, rather than once again name-dropping with Bakhtin, Borges or Nabokov.