Conclusion: Ten Reasons Why Translators Should Read Fiction

Abstract

At the 2008 John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Conference on Law and Humanities, the keynote speaker, Richard Weisberg of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, exhorted lawyers to read at least eight novels a year. I join Rosemary Arrojo (cf. her “The Ethics of Translation” and “Fictional Texts as Pedagogical Tools”) in making a similar plea for the usefulness of fiction as reading material for translation studies. Obviously, the rationale goes beyond the tactical one of a translator of fiction keeping fully up to date and acquiring a range of styles in the target language. (Though I did once feel, way back when I was cotranslating a novel out of the Chinese, that I was becoming a vicarious novelist and that my reading experience of the genre was of use in domesticating the fiction.) Among the mix of instructional materials for the study of translation should be included fictional texts that feature translation as a theme, that have translators as characters, or that present themselves as pseudotranslations. Such texts represent one way of reversing the translator’s invisibility and of connecting translation studies to other areas of inquiry. The increased valences of the idea of translation that have gained currency with the development of ST actually work to render translation more invisible, inasmuch as it loses specific contours in the process of merging with other ideas.