Katy Derbyshire—the intimacy of translation - Books Ireland

Katy Derbyshire—the intimacy of translation - Books Ireland

Katy Derbyshire on translating We’d Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann (Mercier Books) Imagine the work of a literary translator. We spend our days at our computers, immersed in the lives of others – usually fictional characters. Our task is to examine every phrase, work out what it means and what it’s there for, what it does to us and how, then rephrase it in another language. Ideally, that phrase will have an equivalent effect o…