I just submitted a translation project and miss it already

I concluded my first literary translation project today. I can’t wait to share details about it when the time comes. Suffice it to say for now that deep-cut horror nerds will love this one.

My translation and localization work so far was mainly academic texts and boring marketing copy. This project was different and so much more fun.

I translated several classic ghost stories from German into English. It was such a delight to find correspondences for snarky dialogue, or to come up with just the right terms to get across the creepiness of the atmosphere. I loved researching archaic job descriptions and local distance measurements at a certain time. I loved finding correspondences for wordplay and jokes (definitely present in those ghost stories). I loved bringing characters’ voices into English by paying attention to register, to sarcasm, to how nicknames and honorifics were used and thinking through what level of familiarity that implied. Translation is such a beautiful way of deep reading a text.

One page in my notebook is dedicated only to finding out how/if all the many words for “ghost” in English and German differ in meaning.

Have you noticed how many words there are?

Ghost, spirit, phantom, apparition, specter, revenant; Geist, Gespenst, Wiedergänger (hands down my favorite), Phantom, Erscheinung. That’s probably not even all of them.

Inspired by the experience of entering into a story as its translator and bringing its atmosphere, its message into another language, I also started writing a new short story in which several translators use stories to manipulate reality. Let’s see where that goes.