Creative translation Archives - Kristen Gehrman Language Services

Translating Revolutionary Road

Kristen — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 13:04:11 +0000

This year I had the pleasure of working with award-winning Dutch actor Jacob Derwig on the translation of his marvellous play Revolutionary Road, based on the classic American novel by Richard Yates.

The fact that Yates’s novel was originally written in English and Jacob’s stage adaptation of it was written in Dutch made for a fascinating literary translation process. In some ways, the project was a kind of back-translation—taking Jacob’s excellent Dutch stage adaptation of Yates’s prose and converting it “back” into Yatesian English while still staying true to the playwright’s vision. The goal was to create an English version of the play that would offer a convincing echo of the original novel but that could also stand as a modern theatrical work in its own right. The process was reminded me a bit of translating Jij zegt het by Connie Palmen two summers ago.

At the end of the project, Jacob invited us to the final performance of Revolutionary Road by Theater Rotterdam. We were absolutely blown away! We were lucky enough to be part of a group of audience members who got to actually sit on stage, bringing us intimately close to the tragic drama unfolding before our eyes. I took the photo above a few minutes before the show began. Revolutionary Road was one of my favorite translation projects of 2018!

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Translating French comics for Scratches 2

Kristen — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 07:10:09 +0000

Earlier this year, a friend put me in touch with the people behind Scratches, a magazine devoted to the fine art of comics, featuring work by artists from around the world. The edition is edited by Joost Swarte, renowned Dutch cartoonist and graphic designer whose work is regularly featured in the New Yorker (recognize this cover from May?). With an international audience in mind, all Scratches comics are translated into English, and I had the honor of translating work by two well-known French cartoonists, François Ayeroles and Jochen Gerner, for the latest edition, Scratches 2.

It was a really fun project and opened my eyes to new aspects of creative translation. Translating comics poses interesting challenges: not only do you have to capture the meaning of the original text, you also need to account for the interaction between words and images. Lines need to fit into speech bubbles; jokes and wordplays need to sing; sounds should be hearable; emotions should be feelable. What’s the right onomatopoeia (…is it a Zip! a Pff? a Bzz?..) Are the words dictating the images or are the images dictating the words? I enjoyed working these things out as a translator and was delighted to see my translation hand-lettered in the final edition by the artists themselves!

Scratches 2 is available at the Athenaeum Boekhandel.

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