Lydia Davis: evaluation

Transcript context

…As a translator, why do you think that film subtitles are so often so bad? There’s certainly enough money in cinema compared to literary translation. That’s fun. Are they pressed for time? I’d have to guess, because often people press translators to get things done overnight, and more and more so. The constraints are, obviously, you have to translate. You can’t translate faithfully what you’re hearing. You have to translate it in such a way, more briefly so that someone can read it quickly. It’s very hard to retain all of the flavor of the original. I usually don’t see any that are really bad, but I think I’ve learned something from some of them. When I was stuck on a vocabulary word or something, I actually might have learned something. I’d hesitate there to blame the translator because I think, usually, it is a time constraint. I used to discover that I could not earn much of a living if I translated very, very carefully. That was, simply, I could not take so much time. I did take time when it mattered and got paid very poorly, like $1 an hour on some books. Time and money and film industry — I bet it doesn’t work too well. How would you best describe your own motives for being a translator?…

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