The actual state of my desk while translating

Around eleven this morning, I stopped in front of a single sentence. It was twelve words long in the Portuguese original. One verb had no exact English equivalent, and the context was splitting that verb's meaning three ways. The coffee beside my monitor had already gone cold, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd gotten up from my chair. This is the reality of translating novels.

When people imagine a translator's workspace, they seem to picture a tidy desk, one or two neatly arranged dictionaries, and natural light streaming in through a window. My desk is the exact opposite of that. Let me show you what my workspace actually looks like, based on the Brazilian novel I'm currently translating.

A Topographic Map of My Desk

If you looked down at my desk from above right now, here's what you'd see.

• To the left of the monitor: a Portuguese monolingual dictionary, a Portuguese-English dictionary, and a specialized dictionary for colloquialisms and slang. All three are always open. I use online dictionaries too, of course, but paper dictionaries offer a different depth of context. When you look up a word, your eye catches the related words just above and below it, and that widens your translation options.
• To the right of the monitor, Post-its line the edges of the screen. Yellow for "sentences to revisit later," pink for "things to confirm with the author," green for "translation of this word on hold." Right now there are seven yellow ones, three pink, and five green.
• Just in front of the keyboard, within arm's reach, a copy of the original book lies face down. It's a habit (flipping it over so I don't lose my page) but every time I see the spine gradually warping, I feel a twinge of guilt.
• Two mugs. One from this morning, one from yesterday. The reason I haven't cleared yesterday's away isn't laziness (it is laziness) but because I don't want to break my workflow.

Scattered between all of this are a few sheets of A4 paper. On them is a table I've made charting each character's speech patterns. Words the protagonist uses, words the supporting characters use, expressions a particular character only uses when angry. Without this chart, once you get past page 200, the characters' voices start bleeding into each other.

A Four-Hour Paragraph

The hardest thing to explain about translation is that a single very short paragraph can take half a day.

Exactly that happened last week. In one scene of the original novel, the protagonist walks up a morro (a hilltop favela) in Rio, delivering an internal monologue. It was three sentences. Within those three sentences, there was the distinctive rhythm of Brazilian Portuguese, word choices that simultaneously hinted at the protagonist's emotional state, and an expression borrowed from a samba lyric woven in.

If I preserved the rhythm, the meaning got diluted. If I preserved the meaning, the rhythm died. If I handled the samba allusion so that an English-language reader could recognize it, the sentence became over-explanatory. Footnotes were an option, but I had already decided this novel was better served without them.

So I wrote four versions.

The first prioritized rhythm. I matched the syllable structure of English to preserve as much of the original's cadence as possible. When I read it back, the meaning was flimsy. The second prioritized meaning. It was accurate, but the sentences read like a technical report. The third replaced the samba allusion with a similar nuance from English-language popular music. It worked, but the Brazilian setting grew hazy. The fourth: I landed somewhere between rhythm and meaning, kept the samba allusion close to a literal translation, and used context to fill in the atmosphere.

It took four hours. The result is three sentences in English.

When I tell people this, sometimes the response is, "Can't you just do it roughly?" You can do it roughly. No one might ever notice. But I would know. That sensation I felt when I read the original, something like the protagonist's breathing as they climb through Rio's humid air, if I can't feel it in the English sentences too, then it's not a translation. It's a summary.

Tools

Every translator uses different tools. Here's what my setup looks like.

• I almost never use a CAT tool for novel translation. They're efficient for technical or legal documents, but in literary translation, the sentences that translation memory suggests almost always ignore context. A tool that tells you to translate "saudade" the same way every time is useless in a novel, because what that word means on page 70 is different from what it means on page 250.
• Instead, I use a very simple text editor. The original goes on the left side of the screen, the translation on the right. I don't need advanced features. All I need is a blank white screen and a cursor.
• I search corpora frequently. When I want to check how a particular expression is actually used in English and in what context, I look up examples in news articles or existing literary works. A dictionary tells you "this word means this." A corpus shows you how that word actually lives.

And then the single most important tool: reading aloud. If a translated sentence doesn't flow naturally off my tongue, I rewrite it. If anyone saw me muttering to myself in English alone in a room, they'd probably think it was strange, but this is the most honest way to check rhythm. You can fool your eyes, but it's hard to fool your tongue.

What Cold Coffee Means

The fact that there's always a cold cup of coffee on my desk means the work is going well. When the coffee is still warm, there's actually a good chance I'm not focused. Coffee stays warm when I'm sipping it while checking email, scrolling through social media, reading articles that have nothing to do with translation. But when I've fallen completely into a sentence, weighing the heft of a single word, the coffee cools quietly.

That's what happened today. The sentence I stopped at around eleven, I finally cracked around two in the afternoon. I looked away from the monitor and took a sip of coffee. It was completely cold. Through the window, the sky toward Copacabana was clouding over, and it looked like rain. I pushed my chair back, went to the kitchen, and brewed a fresh cup.

When I sit back down at my desk, the next paragraph will be waiting. The Post-its will still line the edges of the monitor, the dictionaries will still be open, and the coffee I just brewed will go cold again. That's fine. That's how this work goes.