Episode 35

Resilience in Translating

I didn’t truly understand the reliance needed for translating until this interview. 

I knew translation was not a word for word process, but the challenges are much more complex than untranslatable idioms. Translation contains culture and context and layers that do not easily shift between languages. But my guest says, the exchange of texts between cultures is worth any headaches and potential ‘lost in translation’ moments.

In this interview, you will meet 

Lawrence Schimel: Author, Translator, and Duende Seeker.

A New Yorker living in Spain and working with people from around the world. 

Tangents Include

• Jewish Surnames
• Name changes at Ellis Island (*I say grandfather but mean to say great-grandfather)
• Special education assessments for multilingual students
• Building resilience to face the publishing industry
• Different bylines for different genres
• Contextualizing culture in translations
• Learning our own language through other languages
• Should we use Italics for ‘foreign words’?
• Are we thinking in our ‘other’ languages or translating our mother tongues?
• Non-binary loopholes when writing in gendered languages 
• Multilingual relationships
• Learning languages changes how we think

Cultures and languages referenced in this episode:

English, German, Jewish, Spanish, Spanglish, Catalan, Galician, Hebrew, Israeli, Arabic, Sephardi, Finnish, Yiddish, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Hinglish, Marathi, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Fang, African, Slovenian, Bolivian, Russian, French… let me know if I missed one.

*Scroll down for: Who is Lawrence? Links & More*