Friday, May 06, 2005

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before...

The Naked Translator stole my scoop today, but the story is so important that it deserves double billing.

Here's a selective quote from the BBC article:
Booker Prize to award translators

A new award honouring translators has been announced by the organisers of the international Booker Prize.

Chairman of the international Booker judging panel John Carey said: "We became increasingly aware of the huge role translators play in making first-rate fiction accessible to a global audience".
Is this just another prize? Hardly. The Booker Prize is hands down the best literary prize in the English language. The Nobel Prize is highly politicized. The Pulitzer is vanilla mainstream. But the Booker? It’s take-no-prisoners innovative. Last year’s winner was excellent, if a bit straightlaced. The also-ran Cloud Atlas, however, is the literary equivalent of a brain transplant: you never see the world the same way again.

Now take that cutting-edge approach and apply it to translation. Beautiful. I can’t wait. I really can’t.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, it's a good thing... Though some journos mangled the text (from the BBC report, it seemed as if Marquez - or another author - will be honored as translator.)
Still, it's easy to translate good authors... (those who are ontologically translatable, that's is), the bad ones are the real challenge... or bad books by previously good authors...