This is a snapshot of an ongoing conversation between Kari Dickson and Nariman Youssef, BCLT Translators in Residence for the Spring term of 2024.
KD: While I am reading, musing and thinking about rhythm and music in translation, you’re focusing on translating both ways. And much to our surprise, the two lines of research cross-pollinate very fruitfully and feed into each other.
NY: As a translator into both English and Arabic, I’ve been thinking about how I experience each of the language directionalities I work in. I’ve always found the L1=target language/L2=source language model to be limiting and exclusionary. So right now, I’m trying to find fresher, more relevant ways to think and talk about how translators relate to their languages. What motivates us to work into one language and out of another? I think the spaces we inhabit between languages are unique and subjective, and our conversations have helped me realise that a big part of being in those spaces for me is about listening.
KD: A few weeks back, we were having a conversation about the mother tongue and the other language – language of habitual use, L2, whatever your preferred term is. And how complex the relationship between these languages can be. I confessed that I would never dare translate into Norwegian, even though I’m bi-lingual to all intents and purposes. Norwegian is a heritage language for me, and I grew up speaking both languages. But I never learnt to write Norwegian until much later, it was all oral. And I remember really struggling to write essays when I was studying there, because even though I read voraciously, I wasn’t familiar with writing standards in the different contexts. I still really only write Norwegian when I’m teaching or sending emails – never longer or literary texts.
NY: That contrast between spoken and written language is of particular interest to me. Arabic is a diglossic language. The Egyptian Arabic I grew up speaking at home is not the same as the Arabic I eventually learned to read and write, and it’s very rarely the same Arabic I translate into and out of. They feed into each other, of course, but I know it would have been much more challenging for me to write in Arabic if I hadn’t had some formal education in the standardised written form.
KD: When Divya Kalavala, the Charles Wallace India Trust Translation Fellow, joined our conversation, she told us that her mother tongue is Telugu, and while they spoke that at home, her schooling was in Hindi and English. So she felt more comfortable talking Telugu and writing Hindi and English. For you, the situation is different again. You speak Egyptian Arabic, but written Arabic is classical and standardised. So there we all were with a language that was primarily oral.
NY: I think you introduced me to the term “language of habitual use”, Kari, and I’m finding it particularly generative in terms of the possibilities it hints at: one can have two or more languages of habitual use; those languages could change based on one’s circumstances and choices. It’s much closer to my “post-colonial” migrant experience than the idea of first and second languages as monolithic, fixed, and all-encompassing.
KD: We then moved on to think about how the sound, rhythm and music impacted our use of that language. Divya told us that because Telugu is very much a spoken language for her, when the author agrees, and the text she is translating is a short story, she sometimes gets the author to record a reading, and she works from the spoken word.
And that gave me an idea that I’m rather excited about. I’m going to find a short story in English that I want to translate into Norwegian and then translate it orally, to see how that works, if it takes away the pressure of getting it right on paper, and frees up my creative language and expression. I could then use the recording to transcribe the translation, and find a helpful Norwegian to discuss how it compares with Norwegian literary standards. And look at how rhythm and music translate the other way. I’m not sure that I’ll have time to do it during the residency, but definitely something I want to experiment with, after our conversations.
NY: My takeaway from that conversation was to try translating out of an audiobook or a recorded reading as my source text. Reading at least a few paragraphs out loud to myself has always been part of my practice anyway, and I’m surprised I’d never thought of that extra step. I love how that chat with Divya pulled together aspects from both our projects and pushed them in a playful direction. There’s also an obvious seed for a workshop there!
Bios:
Kari Dickson is a literary translator from Norwegian. Her work includes crime fiction, literary fiction, children’s books, theatre and non-fiction. Her translation of Roslund & Hellström’s Three Seconds won the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) International Dagger in 2011. She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with BCLT, the National Centre for Writing and the TA committee.
During her residency, Kari will be working on Playing Translation (working title): using improvisation and music to explore the sound of a language, and the rhythm, melody and mood of an original text and translation. She will be working with Dr Haftor Medbøe, professor of music at Napier University Edinburgh.
Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born literary translator and translation consultant based in London. Her literary translations include Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic (UEAP, 2021), Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter (new edition, Interlink, 2020), Donia Kamal’s Cigarette No. 7 (Hoopoe, 2018), and contributions to publications like The Common, Arab Lit Quarterly, and Words Without Borders. In recent years, she has managed an in-house translation team at the British Library, and led and curated translation workshops with Shadow Heroes, the Poetry Translation Centre, Shubbak Festival and Africa Writes. Nariman holds a master’s degree in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh.
Nari’s residency project will aim to interrogate the language affiliation structures that define L1 and L2 translations and the relevance of those structures to bi-directional translators, or translators working out of their ‘mother tongue’.
