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What makes a translation great?

Editor and translator Katy Derbyshire poses the question to ten practitioners and stresses why we need to be talking about it.

Personally, I appreciate musicality in a text and an ability to carry through the feeling of each line: those subtle shifts, for example, when at the end of a paragraph a well-placed word or phrase elicits a laugh, a note of tragedy or irony. I genuinely believe it is possible to identify hallmarks of successful translations – like transferring humour and wordplay, recreating cadence and rhythm, preserving a strong sense of place, and all the things my colleagues have pointed out above. Kleemann really enters into the spirit of the thing, goes along with so many jokes and adds a whole new layer of understanding to our reading, tackling the tricky feat of essentially back-translating a semi-German book written in Spanish.

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