November 2023 saw the British Centre of Literary Translation (BCLT) host an advanced translation workshop for Danish, Norwegian and Swedish to English literary translators. Running online for three days and made possible thanks to the generous support of the Danish Arts Foundation, NORLA and the Swedish Arts Council, the workshop came into being thanks to a small group of dedicated translators, including SELTA Chair Ian Giles.

The event set out to bring together participants from the three Scandinavian language groups throughout, as well as incorporating three parallel workshop strands for each language. There were also  plenary events and networking opportunities to explore the similarities and differences experienced when working as literary translators with Scandinavian languages. Each group was led by a translator facilitator  and joined by  an editor with little to no knowledge of the source language. To cap it all, three online, industry-focused public sessions also took place alongside the workshops covering Trends, Challenges and Perspectives in publishing, translating genre and the infrequently-discussed topic of how to translate works that aren’t really your cup of tea. SELTA’s Sarah Death even shared a virtual afternoon tea with with TA Committee Co-Chair Vineet Lal to discuss her work and career.

A number of SELTA members took part in the translation workshop and have shared their reflections and impressions below. Hopefully these will serve as an insight into a successful and stimulating event, and whet the appetite for future endeavours.

Image from the BCLT.

Jane Davis

As a recent member of SELTA, I hadn’t much interacted with other Scandinavian translators and so I didn’t really know what to expect from the BCLT’s online Advanced Scandinavian Literary Translation Workshop. And when I saw the intense schedule – up to 7 hours of Zoom sessions on each of the three days – I rather regretted signing up at all. But a brisk, informative and entertaining welcoming presentation from Guy Puzey on the interrelationships and  miscomprehensions between the three main Scandinavian languages set the tone for what was to come. High-level, challenging, but extremely enjoyable sessions flashed past as we switched from language groups to mixed groups (mine led by the wonderful Paul Russell Garrett, who started every session with slightly terrifying warm-up exercises borrowed from the theatre world) to general sessions and broadcast webinars. Three editors had also been invited to participate, and they watched in surprise and interest as we argued over nuances and teased out meanings – and then almost always said “You could have moved even further from the source than that”.

We had a virtual pub night and I reflected – not for the first time – that it had been a particularly unfortunate coincidence that I had chosen that week to give up not only alcohol and chocolate but also to restrict myself to a mere two cups of tea or coffee per day.

But what did I learn from the workshop? Well, a few practical things that I can already tell will be worth their weight in gold as I approach future translations:

– If you’re struggling to understand a text written in one of the other languages, read it aloud as though it was your working language. This really helps with comprehension – listening to Ian Giles reading Danish with a Swedish accent was the first time I had ever understood the spoken language without subtitles.

– Make your first draft very rough. This was a technique that proved very successful in my mini-Swedish group because it prevented us from getting bogged down in the details before we had an overview of where the text was going.

– Be more editorial. As the editors kept saying, translators tend to work for the author, replicating every nuance, rather than the reader. It really is okay to smooth things out, miss out tricky concepts and take a much greater distance to the text.

Ultimately, I came away from the experience feeling much more at home amongst a lovely community of people, and with a renewed enthusiasm for translating everything, but particularly literature.

Elizabeth DeNoma

I was truly pleased to be able to join my colleagues for the Advanced Translation Workshop the other week. The programming had clearly been put together with a lot of care by Ian Giles, Kari Dickson and Paul Garrett, and there was a great mix of panel discussion alongside hands-on translation exercises and discussion.

The inclusion of the professional folks was a decided bonus, too, it was incredibly helpful for them to stick around for the entire session.

There are things that we discussed here that I know will stay with me as I approach my translations in the future – and the sense of community that was fostered, through Zoom no less, was a surprising extra benefit!

Thank you so much for the opportunity – what a wonderful use of time. Very grateful for the sponsorship and time all the organizers put into everything.

Kate Lambert

The Advanced Scandinavian Translation Workshop was an amazingly inspiring three days on Zoom. I would previously have said that workshops are always better in person, but without Zoom, I wouldn’t have got to know so many translators based in different countries or been able to work on a translation in a group of four where one of us was in the UK, one in Sweden and two in the US (all credit to them for staying awake in an alien time zone). Shared documents and breakout rooms made it all run smoothly, with the support of the BCLT IT technicians on hand to deal with any glitches.

Translators tend to work in isolation and I always appreciate SELTA’s events where we get the
chance to compare different translations of the same text. At this workshop, we not only submitted texts anonymously for group discussion but also worked together on a chunk of a Swedish autobiographical novel, graphic novels from Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, and an extract from the Swedish translation of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Approaches varied, strokes of genius were celebrated (by the way, Michael should be given credit for our group’s admired addition of the word ‘obviously’) and the key confidence-inspiring thing that came out of all these sessions was that we all take different approaches to the trade-offs that translators have to make.

Many of us translate or have translated from more than one Scandinavian language and the market in which we operate has many similarities across the three countries. At other translator events I have encountered the assumption that if you work with Scandinavia, you get paid so much (comparatively) that you don’t have the right to complain about anything. It was good to be able to share experiences with colleagues who also work specifically in the Scandinavian market.

Another thing that made this workshop different was the presence of professional editors. Gaining an editor’s input on our translations as we produced them added a whole new angle and several of us, I think, found it quite liberating as translators to see how much an editor might change when reading the text as a piece of English writing, though we did also rein in their red pens by explaining the Swedish author’s intentions behind some extremely long sentences. It seemed that both editors and translators benefitted from seeing how the other worked. It was a brilliant idea to have them with us.

It was the BCLT Swedish summer school in 2013 that convinced me I could do literary translation after over ten years on the more commercial side so I was delighted to be attending another BCLT workshop ten years later, having published translations under my belt. Many thanks to everyone involved in making it happen.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Michael Meigs

Our many hours on Zoom from November 9 to 11, 2023 reminded us of the reach and dispersal of the literary translation profession as well as the interests that link us. The chat function quickly filled with greetings from across the world. From the UK and Scandinavian nations, of course, but also, for example, South Africa, Japan, Italy, Croatia, and the United States (east coast, west coast, and Texas, where I reside).

My good fortune was that Ian Giles moderated both smaller seminars to which I’d been assigned. Cheerful, attentive, unfailingly helpful, Ian kept the discussion focused with a light touch, summarizing and rephrasing contributions. He shared his own experiences in publishing, an industry that is woefully opaque to most of us. Someone noted a shelf of intriguing bottles in the background; Ian immediately invited us to drop by for a drink whenever we’re in town.

Literary translators may be the most siloed of artists. The task is lonely as we chip away at our chosen language, sentence by sentence, word by word. Collaborative exercises in this three-day workshop helped counter that isolation. As a team we picked translations apart and suggested alternative renderings, ever in search of the perfect equivalent. The day before the translation workshop began, organizers gave us 48 hours to craft short-fuse English versions of a short passage later revealed to come from Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Reviewing ten two-page first drafts produced under time pressure offered an intriguing array of possible “correct” choices. That key exercise prompted us to discuss in detail considerations of voice, register, focus, and tone.

With a six-hour time difference and sessions starting at 4 a.m. Texas time, I found myself a bit displaced from my immediate surroundings as we progressed through the three days. Removal from the immediacy of my everyday was initially disorienting—but ultimately deeply satisfying. I’d happily apply to repeat the experience.

Kathy Saranpa

Not sure what to expect from the BCLT Advanced Scandinavian Translation Seminar – and equal parts daunted and excited by the prospect of three full days online with other translators – I logged on Tuesday 7 November at noon Finnish time to a warm welcome and a fascinating keynote lecture by Dr Guy Puzey that set the tone for three days of text-based work, learning, community and camaraderie.

Now looking back at those three days, I feel that it was one of those events that stick with you for a long time because there were so many aspects of it to reconsider – is it ever OK to use the phrase ‘relentless darkness? What texts can I pitch to Editor X? Why does recasting my translation in a different font help so much in proofreading and editing?

And then of course there’s that irresistible urge to reread Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow…

Our own Ian Giles and the two coordinators from Danish and Norwegian, Paul Garrett and Kari Dickson, succeeded beyond all of my expectations. The work sessions were well-organized, well-run and thoroughly captivating and bore witness to extraordinary footwork ahead of time. The texts we worked with were excellent for their purposes and the use of graphic novels to introduce translators unfamiliar with the other two languages was a stroke of genius. They took everything into consideration – the need for reliably working technology (I’ve never seen a better or more efficient use of Zoom break rooms) and the necessity of altering focused text study with listening to webinars on a headset while walking around in a different room are two examples. It also added a lot to have editors and publishers ‘visiting’ – what they had to say about their professions as well as what they observed about us translators was very useful information.

Three days of Zoom meetings may sound like torture to some people, but Ian, Paul and Kari made it work. This is not to say that we weren’t exhausted by the end of Day Three, but for me, and I suspect for others, it was more a function of having so much ‘good stuff’ crammed into such a short space of time. While I am very much for an in-person translation seminar at some point in the future, this proved that you can have an incredibly valuable experience online as well.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

William Sleath

The recent online Advanced Scandinavian Translation Workshop was extraordinarily good, and I benefited enormously from taking part.

The highlight for me was the Swedish-English group translation sessions, which gave one the rare opportunity to translate together with colleagues. This was a great treat in a profession where one chiefly works in isolation. It was fascinating to juggle a plethora of translations of a word or phrase in search of the mot juste – and often we found not just one mot juste but several contenders.

Another intriguing session was the one devoted to translating ‘Scandinavianly’. Seeing how speakers of each of the three languages perceived speakers of the other languages was an eye-opener. I was above all relieved not to be the only one who found spoken Danish a nightmare!

Guy Puzey’s excellent lecture made for an impressive start to the three days, which were packed with a variety of sessions. The timetable even included a ‘pub night’, which to my surprise worked very well, despite its being on Zoom.

Whilst the Zoom format has its limitations, it meant participants in other countries were able to take part – and as far as I’m concerned it meant I took part in something I might not have attended had it involved travel & overnight stays.

Last but not least, the fact that each translator received a bursary for the workshop made participation a no-brainer.

Nicky Smalley

Over three packed days, thirty-three Scandinavian translators went deep into the complexities and conundrums of their craft. I was lucky enough to be welcomed into the Norwegian-focused group, and as someone who feels most at home in Swedish, it was a real treat to work with practiced, skilled Norwegian specialists. With a range of practical translation challenges, featuring a range of short texts that presented different challenges (knotty, playful novel excerpts, highly idiomatic language, the challenges of brevity and image-correspondence in graphic novels, a snippet of a famous Danish novel in its Scandinavian translations) we were really tested. The practical work was augmented with a series of genuinely fascinating and brilliantly put-together panel discussions that looked at some of the practical workplace concerns faced by translators. All this was topped off by the inclusion of some talented and brilliantly frank editors, and several publishers who provided some very meaningful and insightful advice. All in all it was three days, incredibly well-spent! With thanks to the speakers, the other participants, and most of all, the organisers, who really went above and beyond in putting together a fantastic programme.

Photos by Ian Giles.

Sarah Death writes:

The recent SELTA translation workshop, held at the Swedish Embassy in London at the kind invitation of the cultural counsellor and her team, was the brainchild of former chair Ruth Urbom and brought to fruition by her hard work, with the help of Chair Ian Giles and the SELTA committee. The theme of the event was working-class writers and our four guests from Sweden introduced themselves and their work before we broke into author-led groups to take a closer look at the extracts we had prepared and the many and various solutions we had found.

I was part of the group that enjoyed a very fruitful session working with author and critic Anneli Jordahl, who has a long catalogue of titles to her name, both fiction and non-fiction. She is a critic and reviewer for the Swedish papers Aftonbladet, Expressen and Sydsvenska Dagbladet and has won numerous literary prizes.

As has become customary at SELTA workshops, those who had done the translation in advance – including members who could not attend – had sent in their work, and thanks to the organisers we had in front of us an anonymised array of English versions to inform our discussion. When a group of literary translators assembles to work on a text they have prepared, the discussions can be quite intense, detailed and niche, but having the author there always leads to more insightful and rewarding work, and Annneli was such an engaging collaborator.

We worked with her on an extract from her recent, book-length essay Orm med två huvuden (2019, Snake with Two Heads) in which she casts an appraising eye on her own background and its impact on her dual – and sometimes conflicting – roles as an author and a critic. For someone from her background to be accepted as a critic, she told us, it was a real struggle. The extract we tackled was from a section in which the young Anneli becomes a latchkey kid and discovers her appetite for books and the joy of libraries and solitary reading.

The first challenge hit us in the very first sentence. Anneli’s parents lived in a ‘Mexitegelvilla’, house of a type that has become pretty much synonymous with the optimistic and aspirational spirit of Sweden in the 1970s. The building material, ‘Mexitegel’ is a shimmering kind of white brick and the ‘villa’ is nothing like the Mediterranean image that this might conjure up for a British reader but simply a standard, free-standing Swedish domestic residence. Yet how to encapsulate all this and convey all those associations with a simplicity that comes anywhere near that of the single word in the original Swedish? None of our versions could really do it full justice.

Anneli’s father was an electrician and her mother worked in a restaurant. She writes of them as ‘pappa’ and ‘mamma’, which seems simple enough, but these words are perennially problematic for translators into English in terms of register and cultural connotations. Take ‘mamma’, for example. We discussed leaving it unchanged, but does it sound a little too much like a child’s exclamation? Eventually we concluded that all solutions had their drawbacks. ‘Mama’ has too Victorian a flavour, doesn’t it? Is ‘Mum’ too British and ‘Mom’ too American? Does ‘Mummy’ sound too childish, or too upper-middle-class British? Anneli gave us some interesting background information: in Sweden there were, and perhaps still are, regional variations. In Skåne, your parents would be known as ‘mor och far’, whereas in Dalarna they would be ‘mamma och pappa’.

Anneli’s mother worked for many years at ‘Stadshotellet’ (traditionally the leading hotel in a town) where her job description in Swedish was ‘kallskänka’. There is a great deal to unpack in this word before one can even think of trying to find an appropriate translation. Various dictionaries offered us the term ‘cold-buffet manageress’, which sounds like someone who takes bookings, shows people to their tables and makes sure the buffet platters are replenished; but the title also has that slight managerial ring. Anneli explained that in reality it was a job with quite a lowly place in hierarchy but requiring considerable artistic skills. It involved not only arranging all those eye-catching platters of smorgåsbord essentials but also constructing the smörgåstårta, the staple of summer Swedish catering: essentially a party-sized cut-and-share club sandwich, full of seafood and other layers, all held together with mayonnaise and beautifully decorated with unshelled prawns and fronds or flower-heads of dill. How could we render all this cultural context in English? In the end, reluctant to overload the sentence, we decided to make do with the rather underwhelming phrase ‘running the lunch buffet’.

Moving on to how Anneli was expected to behave as a child, we read in our text that her mother thought it safest in social terms for her largely to be seen and not heard, but – as was quite common at that period – she would sometimes be expected to niga, that is, to curtsey, to important guests. We had an entertaining interlude in which full, deep curtsey (called a hovnigning or court curtsey in Swedish, Anneli told us) was demonstrated by one of our number, but decided that for a young girl we would probably use ‘bob’ or ‘give a bob’, as long as we were sure the context made it clear what was going on.

In the next section Anneli described the gloriously indiscriminate reading of her childhood, everything from Asterix to Jules Verne – ‘från A till Ö’, as Anneli’s text put it, which in English surely has to become A to Z?  We were faced with putting the extensive lists into succinct English, and not cramming them to full of explanatory detail. One example was Vilhelm Moberg’s ‘Utvandrarromaner’, his quartet of novels (1949-59) set in the 1850s, when hardship and hunger forced waves of emigration from Sweden to North America. In these days when readers can look up anything online in a trice, is it all right simply to say ‘the Emigrant novels by Vilhelm Moberg’?

The discussion turned to the general importance of local libraries in both Britain and Sweden for educating and inspiring children. Many Swedish working-class writers have described their vital function in less-privileged childhoods, underpinning many a subsequent class journey. Anneli told us about a successful – and rather touching – modern-day initiative in a library in her own area. Children who are too nervous and intimidated to read out loud in class can go there to read to Book Dog, a trained dog who sits and listens as they read. The scheme has boosted the confidence of many young readers.

The perfect conclusion to our wide-ranging discussions was the group’s wholehearted applause for Anneli’s enthusiastic participation, and also for the fact that she now has the job of her dreams. When young Anneli wistfully enquired whether there was a job she could do in adulthood that would allow her to keep her nose in a book all day, her mother of course said no. But now, she jokes, the majority of her work as a critic and reviewer does indeed involve lying on the sofa, reading!

Kathy Saranpa writes:

On Thursday, October 21, around 20 participants, including authors and guests, assembled at the Swedish Embassy in London in a bright and pleasant room facing the courtyard. After hanging up our coats, signing in, disinfecting our hands, and putting on our masks, we were greeted most warmly by our hosts, Ruth Urbom and Ian Giles, and by a welcome table of coffee, tea and treats. We had a fully packed day ahead of us, and Ruth and Ian kept us on schedule in a very gracious and efficient manner. Ruth explained to us how she had happened to choose the topic of working-class writers, giving us a look at her own background as a log chopper’s assistant. (You’ll have to ask her for the correct term – and terminology was definitely one of the issues surrounding the day’s topic.) She had also noticed that there was a festival of working-class writers scheduled in Bristol on October 22, and worked behind the scenes to enable four Swedish writers to attend. What a terrific opportunity for us!

Susanna Alakoski introduced herself and her ‘klassresa’, another theme for the day, noting that she was 17 before she set foot in a library. Otherwise, those places were far too fine for someone like her. Her first story, ‘Pärs första fisk,’ was the result of her having found a fresh (?) cod, passing it off at home as edible and not eating the soup made from it in case she had to take care of sick family members. She spoke of her very difficult childhood and the struggles she had as a ‘finnjävel’ – another thread that returned with the next speaker, Eija Hetekivi Olsson. She grew up in a rough Gothenburg suburb, Angered, and brought home the grim reality of working-class families almost from the beginning of her remarks: The most segregated city in Europe, Gothenburg features a difference in life expectancy of 30 years between those living in the most affluent areas and those living in Angered. Eija never expected to live very long, so she began writing about her experience in letters to her two daughters – which became books.

After the introductions to these two authors, we split up into two groups. I participated in the session with Susanna Alakoski. The issues we worked on dealt primarily with vocabulary (skiftflicka: doffer? shift girl?; trådrullar: bobbins? spools, reels? and the like) but also tricky citation issues such as the folk song ‘spinn min flicka spinn’ and the quote from Merrie England. What do you do when you don’t have the original text – translate it yourself? We spent a lot of time also simply enjoying the fact that we were working with a real author in real time! It became clear that both professions require a lot of research, but also that translators and authors don’t always have the same priorities or the same amount of power.

We were served a scrumptious, generous lunch along with a well-needed one-hour break for some fresh air out from behind masks. Then the afternoon session began with Anneli Jordahl introducing herself. She explained that she had taken a translation exam once but failed miserably because she had stuck too close to the text (sigh. Weren’t we all there once upon a time?). So she expressed her admiration for what we do. Her “klassresa” began when she got the keys to a library – as a cleaning woman. But she had access to all of those books and, like her character in Ormen med två huvuden, she read indiscriminately – as she explained later, her parents did not hierarchize her reading for her. Next, Mats Jonsson introduced himself as growing up as the only child in his village in Norrland – his best friends were elderly people, who often told him stories, and he credits them for giving him a sense of narrative. He read many comic books as a child and found that this was a genre he could express himself well in – and that they weren’t just for ‘barn och debila’.

I found myself in Anneli Jordahl’s session afterwards. Our first stumbling block was a brick – ‘mexitegel’. How on earth do you express all of the connotations of this word without using a run-on sentence? Another tricky single-word conundrum was ‘skönt’, the word the main character uses after telling the reader that she’s a latchkey child (latchkey was a unanimous choice for ‘nyckelbarn’). Great? Nice? We agreed there was ambiguity in this word until you got to the next sentence. Do you make things easier for the reader, or provide the same degree of vagueness? Other words we talked about were ‘skönlitteratur’, ‘niga’ (which elicited a lovely curtsey from Annie Prime!), ‘ensamförsörjande’, ‘surminen’, and the quotation from Kristina Lugn about indiscriminate reading. We also had some general discussion about translation and writing – having a real-live author there made it difficult to stick strictly to the text. But I suspect that was just fine.

We reconvened after another coffee break and summarized the day. One of the students remarked that she had had no idea of the complexity of literary translation – but she did not seem scared away. Ruth Urbom thanked the Swedish Embassy, the Swedish Literary Exchange, and the authors themselves. When she first thought of creating this workshop, she had four authors in mind and then listed the ones she would contact if she couldn’t get her top 4. She revealed that her top 4 were sitting there with us. Every one of them had said ‘yes’.

As a new member of SELTA, I was simply blown away by the opportunity to compare translations with colleagues, and equally by the kindness, the humor and the skill they all displayed. I even got an ‘inside’ glimpse of what Brexit has meant in a chat with Ian, and some great tips for places to go on this first trip to London from Henry. I will definitely make this trip again for a future workshop.

Anna McGroarty writes:

At the end of October, I had the pleasure of attending the SELTA translation workshop on working class literature at the Swedish Embassy in London. This was my first SELTA event, and I enjoyed it immensely. I think everyone present was thrilled to finally be able to get together in person again. Having the opportunity to discuss translation choices, difficulties, and ideas with colleagues in person was a hugely rewarding experience. We were also incredibly lucky to have the authors of the books being workshopped with us on the day, giving interesting presentations on their works and backgrounds and participating in our discussions.

In the afternoon, my break-away group chose to focus on an excerpt from Mats Jonsson’s graphic novel Nya Norrland. As most of us had no previous experience of translating this type of text, we were all curious to find out more not only about the craft of translating comics, but also the process of writing and publishing them. We learned plenty from Jonsson who, in addition to having published several highly successful graphic novels, also spent many years working as an editor at Galago, one of Sweden’s largest graphic novel imprints.

Much of our subsequent discussion centred on the difficulties and peculiarities that a text of this nature presents for the translator. Jonsson made the point that the translation of a graphic novel is a whole other animal; one that arguably has more in common with subtitling than with ‘classic’ literary translation, chiefly due to the paramount issue of space. Unless it is possible to increase the size of the text boxes and speech bubbles (usually the task of the letterer, a further person with whom the translator may need to interact over the course of the translation process), the translated text needs to fit in the space allocated to the original in the corresponding text box. Given that text volume tends to expand in translation from Swedish into English, this creates an obvious dilemma, similar to that faced by subtitlers.

The group immediately noted that some tough decisions would have to be made. What needs to be retained to stay true to the original and tell the story, and what can be sacrificed? The need for the translator to be pragmatic becomes clear. Similarly, where in a traditional book, the translator might be able to play around with the structure to make the text flow well in English, the graphic novel translator does not have this luxury. The translation must correspond to the illustration panel in which the original text appears in for the story to make sense to the reader. Our group considered that while these issues impose certain limitations on the translator, there is perhaps also a freedom in being allowed to take more liberties with the source text to make the necessary cuts.

These issues aside, the drawings in a graphic novel add a visual element to the translation process and another layer for the translator to interpret in addition to the text. This has its own appeal for readers and translators alike and is part of what makes the format so unique and captivating.

Lily Stewart writes:

I was barely three weeks into my master’s degree studying Translation Studies at UCL when I was presented with the wonderful opportunity to attend SELTA’s annual literary workshop, joining Swedish authors and translators of Swedish literature into English. As a student of the Scandinavian languages and an enthusiast for literary translation in particular, this was a window into the profession that could not be turned down – and at the Swedish Embassy, no less!

In the morning, the authors Susanna Alakoski and Eija Hetekivi Olsson introduced themselves and their work, speaking especially on the theme of ‘arbetarlitteratur’ and of their personal ‘klassresa’ and how class had motivated and moulded their writing. With this context in mind, we then split into groups to discuss our translations of their work.

My group looked at Eija’s text; an extract from her acclaimed 2012 book Ingenbarnsland. Eija had related to us the influence of her own upbringing in the Gothenburg suburbs on her writing; coming from a Finnish migrant family, her mother a cleaner and her friends and peers with few prospects of advancement or even an average life expectancy. This background is very transparent in the text. The dialogue between the two girls in the extract is distinctively in the Gothenburg dialect, with Finnish influence and 1980s slang. This posed a challenge in terms of situating the characters in time and place for an anglophone audience. To relay the equivalent sense, we discussed how we could convey a non-standard working-class dialect without taking it to the extreme of, for example, peppering the dialogue with Geordie slang! Aside from the clear oddity of this approach, we would then be faced with the issue of whether we could make this work for a North American readership, in which case the ‘equivalent’ dialect would again have to be different.

Another point of discussion was how we could translate the humorous way the girls talk, with examples such as ‘E du go eller?’ rendered by one translator as ‘Are you off your rocker?’, but again lacking the distinctive humour that the Gothenburg dialect lends. It was suggested that where we must inevitably lose humour from one aspect of the text, we can compensate in other areas of our translation. The girls are raw and rude and we talked about their tone and attitude being important to preserve in translation, but also considered the question of how brash we want to be and the target readers would allow us to be. The mention of a character taking a 100 SEK ‘en hundring’ from their mother also posed a challenge. One clever suggestion was the translation of ‘a tenner’, which carries the same colloquial sense of ‘hundring’ and states the equivalent value, without going as far as to simply render it as the rough conversion of £10, which we all felt would take the setting too far away from Sweden.

Something which particularly struck me was the translators’ reactions to each other’s work and how much everyone seemed to relish the opportunity for collaboration and vigorous discussion which the workshop sparked. Translators were able to compare their work and decision-making processes, and as our translations differed, we discussed at length the justification of our choices and pondered how far a translator can fight to defend their choice. The direct communication with the translators was also invaluable, and it felt wonderfully empowering to be able to ask the author instantly what their intentions had been when we encountered a particularly tricky or ambiguous line!

I have taken so much from the SELTA workshop, and it has not only strengthened my desire to pursue Swedish literary translation but has given me a better sense of how to achieve this. What’s more, everyone I met at the event was so approachable, helpful, friendly, and inspiring, and I would like to thank Ian Giles and Ruth Urbom for organising the workshop and for being so accommodating.

Sophie Ruthven is an emerging literary translator of Swedish living in Innsbruck. She joined us for our translation workshop in Edinburgh.

A certain playfulness is required to sling possible Anglophone versions of kärring around a table with enthusiasm, and the group of often-solitary translators were certainly not left laughter- free at SELTA’s literary translation workshop in Edinburgh. Yet the duty of giving a text to a new linguistic audience is anything but light, and when the author has allowed their debut novel to be dissected (however lovingly) by a team of both experienced literary translators and those of us who are curious starters to the literary side of things, a lot of weight rests on picking the correct language. Even if the workshop is exploratory, even if the notion of completing the translation is purely hypothetical. Translators have a certain power which can be misused, and when the source text presents problems of power balance inherent in the use of different languages, we have to solve puzzles to the best of our ability.

Then again, can we always realistically carry out our task? This question arose during a workshop with the Finland-Swedish author Adrian Perera and his novel Mamma, one of whose characters is a multilingual mother living in Swedish-speaking Finland, viewed through the eyes of her son, Tony. We translators fell into what we do best: we zoomed in on the micro details of a text, sometimes losing sight of the text as a whole in the process. Though in the case of the extract from Mamma, we weren’t necessarily tying ourselves in knots over a curious adjective which didn’t sing in the English translation, rather the challenge of rendering a Swedish work in English, when the broken English of the protagonist Tony’s immigrant mother (spoken alongside Sinhala and Finnish), is, both in itself and its quality, a crucial part of the text, an indicator of both class and cultural difference, in a Swedish-speaking area of Finland. That’s a lot of layers of linguistic minority/majority interplay. There are footnotes which give clarity to grammatically problematic utterances, also serving to keep the narrative along the lines of Tony’s understanding. We considered adding some in to explain linguistic nuance, but then again, it would seem a shame to turn the book into a ‘Primer for Swedish Finland’, which would be both incorrect and potentially unreadable.

In his presentation of Mamma, Perera had floated the idea that no interpreter exists who doesn’t draw on something else with their interpretations, as all reality is inherently subjective. With the reader as the interpreter of the text after the translator has presented it to them in the reader’s own language: if the whole text is rendered in English, will the resultant invisibility of the English and foreign-ification of the Swedish parts disrupt the power-balance of the novel? Would an English reader judge the mother’s broken language in the same way as they would judge the doctor’s with whom she speaks’? Such a scene could be clearly read by a Finland Swede, but may become just a tangle of many Othernesses to an English language reader. The diversity which we wish to present to the new audience may end up simply invisible to that audience. Any good workshop often throws up more questions than answers, though it’s curious to be stumped over whether something can be translated at all.

Konsten att göra intryck: Angela Ahola, (Natur & Kultur, 2016)