The Translation Issue

My grandmother spoke three languages and dreamed, she once told me, in a fourth she had never learned to write. I have thought of her often while editing this issue, which is about what passes between languages and what gets stuck at the border.

Funmi Adeyemi sat down with the newest translator of The Weir House, a 19th-century novel that has now been carried into English four times. Translating the Same Novel for the Fourth Time lays the opening sentences side by side, and the differences are small, stubborn, and fascinating. Each predecessor was right about something. The newest translator explains, generously, why she started over anyway.

Nadia Rahman’s Machine Translation Is Coming for Languages With 4,000 Speakers travels to an island where volunteers are building a corpus of their language so that a machine can learn it. For some speakers, a decent translation tool is a lifeline for a language their grandchildren are losing. For others, it is a way for errors to harden into the norm. Nadia lets both sides make their case, and it is not obvious who is right.

And Agata Kowalczyk, in Against the ‘Untranslatable Word’, takes aim at a genre we have all enjoyed: the list of foreign words for feelings English supposedly can’t name. Her argument—that every word can be translated with enough context, and that the genre flatters us more than it informs us—is a pleasure to argue with.

Translation, all three pieces suggest, is less a matter of finding the right word than of deciding what you are willing to lose. That seems to me a fair description of editing, too.