On Being an Exophonic Translator: A Special Section

Ani Jilavyan:

George Steiner talks about translation as an "inherently appropriative and therefore violent act," but he most likely refers to translating from a foreign language into one's own. The concept still applies if the direction of translation is reversed, but less so, because when I translate from my mother tongue, Armenian, it is easier for me to interpret the text or find hints on how to interpret the text. But when I work with an English text, it takes more time and effort to see specific patterns that would help to interpret the text as close to the original as possible. The violence of extra interpretation, of trying to find meanings that aren’t in the original, of digging deeper into the text than needed, of over-analyzing, may result in a drastically changed text. To me, being less violent means trying to avoid interpretive additions that are not in the original. Even if I “violate” something as I translate into Armenian, I might acknowledge it, while in the case of exophonic translation, it is easier to “violate” something without realizing it.

Being an exophonic translator is challenging, as sometimes I need to do more research and more learning when translating from my mother tongue into English. Especially challenging are idioms. As I translate comedy, sometimes there are puns based on specific idioms. This creates the question of whether I need to fully change the idiom and make a pun based on it, or to try to keep the idiom and the pun as close to the original as possible. I usually try both and take the one that works best. But these challenges have their rewards: I learn something new and develop my problem-solving skills, and finding a great translation solution feels heart-warming.

My exophonic translation process is not very different from my translation process of English-Armenian translation. In both cases, I have many drafts and versions. The editing stage is a bit harder for now when it comes to exophonic translation because I usually double-check how things sound with native speakers, while in Armenian I can immediately hear that something sounds wrong or needs to be changed.

I got interested in translation accidentally, in my sophomore year at the American University of Armenia. When I entered the Armenian Language and Literature classroom, professor Dr. Siranush Dvoyan told us that we were going to do translations during the first half of the semester. For a moment I thought of dropping that course, but I also wanted to challenge myself, so I decided to stay. When we were translating three paragraphs from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the class, it took me several hours to complete them, as I faced many linguistic difficulties. While discussing the most problematic sentence in the classroom, three of my peers read their versions, but in each of them essential elements were lost. I raised my hand and read my version. You cannot imagine how proud I felt when the professor complimented my translation. Once we moved to the second half of the semester and stopped doing translations, I felt upset. After this very positive experience, I took all the translation courses in my program and never regretted it. In those courses I translated both technical and literary pieces from English to Armenian as well as from Armenian to English. Exophonic translation brought up more challenges, and that felt interesting. However, at that point I didn’t know that I was going to end up being a translator, moreover an exophonic one. That mostly happened after Armenia became embroiled in a terrible war with Azerbaijan in 2020. There was a moment of despair when we wanted to talk and be heard. Throughout that whole time, our professor, Dr. Shushan Avagyan made us feel empowered as translators and believe that whatever we are doing matters and we should continue it.

In 2023, because of the Azerbaijan's blockade of the only road leading from Armenia to Artsakh, Armenians faced genocide in Azerbaijan. The blockade seriously impeded food, medical supplies, and other essentials to the region of about 120,000 people. As a translator, I felt like sharing my country’s literary masterpieces would bring attention to my country and more people might get interested in it and see what we struggle with. I want to believe that I can make some difference.

Nicky Nenkov:

While I am glad that exophonic translation has become more visible and prominent in the translation world, I have to be honest: as an exophonic translator, I’m tired of talking about it. Since arriving at the MFA program in Literary Translation, it seems that almost every other day, I get stuck in a conversation about exophonic translation, and people question me about its merits (does it have any?), its dangers (surely there are many!), and, ultimately, my position on it. I’ve found it difficult to explain to people that I hardly have a position on exophonic translation; it’s a thing that I do, and that people around me do, and it seems that the work we do is good, so I don’t think too hard about it. People usually aren’t content with that, and they ask me, and the questions continue, first general—what does it take to be a good exophonic translator? —and then personal—how did I learn to speak English? How did I learn to write English? How did I learn to translate into English?

In my experience, many of the questions I get as an exophonic translator are also questions I get as a second-language speaker of English; and they are questions that I get, ultimately, as an immigrant. There’s a disbelief I have to overcome whenever people discover that I learned English in a classroom setting, especially when faced with my confidence in English. People are surprised at my accent (it sounds so American!), my use of colloquialisms, my knowledge of English variants, and so on. It’s frustrating: I have spent most of my life studying English, and most of my academic career perfecting my writing and my skills as a translator; and yet, these skills, which I believe to form the basis of a translator’s ability, are not presumed when people talk about exophonic translators, even when we are in the same rooms, real or metaphorical, as our native Anglophone counterparts.

Often, translators will take liberties with the English language. Workshops, as spaces of experiment and learning, welcome liberties of all kinds, and I’ve seen my colleagues push the boundaries of English further than ever as they discover where their own sensibilities lie. This stretching of language is a vital part of translation; it’s a presupposition of our work and one of the most important cornerstones of our practice. It is exciting to see the leaps my colleagues take; it is equally disappointing to see, however, my native Anglophone colleagues praised for it while I and my fellow exophonic translators have our work over-examined and corrected under the assumption that every deviation from the standard is a mistake rather than a conscious choice. It seems that, no matter how much time or energy I pour into working in English, I will never be granted the freedom to play with English the way they do.

It is similarly frustrating to realize that, as an exophonic translator, I will never be praised for my knowledge of Bulgarian. It is seen as innate and natural, but also presumed to be the same as the knowledge my colleagues have of their own languages they translate from. I admire their work: I cannot imagine working with literary artifacts from a language and culture I do not know intimately, perhaps exactly because of the comfort in my knowledge of Bulgarian I have now. When we speak about bridge translations, or working with language informants, I often wonder if I would be able to share the weight my work carries with someone else; if I would be able to rely so deeply on someone else’s reading, on someone else’s knowledge. In a way, it must be freeing: if translation is construed as a two-part process, leading a text out of one linguistic and cultural space and into another, being given a text already led out and only having to lead it into English means you can pass on the onus of cultural knowledge to your collaborator, be it an informant or a dictionary or an online forum.

Ultimately, I believe that the issue with speaking about exophonic translation is that exophonic translator, much like native speaker, is a term that has nothing to do with someone’s talent or ambitions, but rather all to do with their history. Much like we cannot assume that all native speakers share the same capacity for poetry or rhetoric, we should not assume a translator’s proficiency based on their native language. The English language doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and more and more people from around the world are both writing in English and translating from their languages into English. If we become more generous readers, making fewer assumptions about work based on one’s background, whether social or cultural or ethnic or linguistic, perhaps this language we share can stretch even further, grow even bigger, and, maybe, read even better.

Nadhif Seto Sanubari:

On Roots and Rice
A certain myth persists that ancient humans were physically incapable of perceiving the color blue. This misconception first stemmed from scholars who had noticed the distinct lack of references to the color in ancient works such as Homer’s Odyssey, in which he described the ocean as having “the color of dark wine”. We now know that the ancient Greeks were not, in fact, blue-blind. Instead, there were so few things crucial to their survival that sported the color blue that they had not seen it as its own separate color and never thought to come up with a word for it. Especially when compared to the black of night, white of sunrays, red of blood, and green of plants, all of which came about much earlier in most budding languages.

Meanwhile, on the other side of this mythical coin, the Inuit people have been said to have a hundred words that describe snow. While this is also not necessarily factual, it does demonstrate how much language is entangled with the things that are deemed essential by each respective culture. Another example, one which is true this time, is with Indonesians and rice. This grain is such a crucial element of our daily meals that every KFC order comes packed with a ball of rice, and I have personally known people who insist that their bellies will not be satiated until they have ingested several mouthfuls. It is that important, even, that we have come up with at least four words for the rice, one for each act in its life story. Padi  for the lanky stalks swaying in the fields, gabah for the brownish grain-seed we pluck out of them, beras after it has been peeled by man or machine then sold in markets by the bag, and nasi for the sticky, cooked final product that comes with your happy meal. In English, however, the entirety of this saga can be succinctly summarized by uttering a single syllable: rice.

I’ve never considered myself a “no rice, no meal” type of person. While rice was often included in most meals I ate back home, I would also jump at the chance of ordering a supreme pizza or replacing my chicken and rice combo with a chicken burger (or a chicken sandwich, as my US-born wife would correct me, even though every Indonesian menu I’ve ever read lists them as chicken burgers). So much so, in fact, that I considered pizza and hamburgers my favorite foods, leaps and bounds over any Indonesian dish I’ve ever had. This preference was reflected in my other interests as well. The number of Indonesian books, movies, or music I am familiar with pales in comparison to how much English-language media I consume. To this day, I’ve always attributed this to my fluency in the English language, which in turn earned me much praise and high marks in English classes, which then strengthens my passion for anything written in English. A continuous cycle. I must admit that, growing up, the many compliments I’ve received by peers and teachers on how well I write and speak English became something of a point of pride. It intensified my belief that “this is what I’m good at”. It also created a problematic perception that, in my mind, set the English language on a pedestal higher than Indonesian. “Everyone around me can speak and write Indonesian easily enough, but they often have trouble doing the same in English. Therefore, English must be the ‘higher’ language.”

Little did I know at the time that this borderline obsession with comparing the two languages would eventually lead to my foray into translation. While watching an English-language film on Netflix, I suddenly had the compulsion to turn on Indonesian subtitles, even though I didn’t need them, just to see how the subtitlers chose to translate certain things. I found myself “editing” the subtitles in my head and noting how I would do things differently. This seemingly inconsequential curiosity eventually snowballed into flying halfway across the world to study literary translation at the University of Iowa.

And just like that, things were flipped on its head. No longer did I hear Indonesian spoken casually around me, or saw it plastered over passing street signs and billboards, and neither did I have anyone who I could converse with in my native language on a daily basis. Strangers still complimented me on my fluency in English, yet they now illicit a different reaction in me. They didn’t praise me because I received good grades in English class or that I speak more fluently than everyone else. They praised me because they were surprised that I didn’t sound different, that I didn’t have an accent or speak in broken English. They praised me because they didn’t expect me to sound “American”. No longer could I pride myself on how fluent I was in English, or how much knowledge I had of English-language media. Now people were more interested that I was Indonesian. A part of my identity that had long lied in the back of my mind was suddenly dragged onto the forefront. Like countless others, an identification badge was thrust upon me as soon as I stepped on American soil. Suddenly I was “Indonesian”, “Southeast Asian”, or just “Asian”. I stopped being just a person and became a “person of color.”

I looked at my American cohorts and noticed that they had exceptional knowledge of their source languages because they chose to learn and absorb them as their second or third languages, just as I did with the English language. I wrestled with a persistent self-doubt that I had comparatively limited knowledge of literature in my source language, even though it’s my native language. Once again, an identity I never thought existed was given to me. I was no longer just a writer or translator. I’m now an “exophonic” writer and translator.

I began telling people that I aim to introduce the lesser-known Indonesian literature to the English-speaking world. “That’s a very noble goal,” people would say. Then they would ask what the Indonesian literary scene is like, and I would realize that I had no answer. I soon realized that not only was I mentally alienating myself from anything Indonesian, but now I was also physically removed from it. If I had continued on my present course, my connection to my home would slowly but surely fade into memory, and my roots would recede into nothing. I began flipping through the stack of Indonesian books that my dad packed for me before I left. Books from his shelf that I’ve always ignored up until then. It was a search for a justification for my choices because whatever justification I had before suddenly wasn’t enough.

But in this frantic search I found something that I didn’t expect to find. The Indonesian prose and poetry gave me a kind of profound appreciation and acceptance that I had not felt before. In a way that no English-language literature had ever managed to do, I was able to see myself within these written words. In these authors, my predecessors, I saw a history that I’m a part of. This was not an identity that was swiftly carved onto my forehead while I wasn’t looking, it was one that had always been a part of me, and one that I had begun to learn to embrace. There has never been a higher-lower hierarchy between languages. While my Indonesian peers might praise my fluency in English, my English-speaking cohorts find more fascination in the Indonesian works that I translate. It is all a matter of perspective. The fact that I was born on an island in a series of islands that just so happened to be Indonesia is entirely circumstantial. It’s how I perceive this fact and what I choose to do with it that really matters in the end. Through this epiphany I began to view things differently. I started to share my cohorts’ passion as they show fascination in the magical Indonesian stories I translated. I found joy in introducing my wife to Indonesian dishes that I loved to eat growing up, though I previously never bothered to learn the recipes.

Like the Greeks and their odysseys through their wine-dark sea, it took me a trip halfway around the world to finally realize the sheer inseparability of one’s ways of perceiving and their language. However, to master a language, as well as convert it into another requires you not only to learn the grammatical syntax, but also to imbibe its culture and the mindset of its people much like a young Nadhif once did with the English language. I now find fulfillment in reacquainting myself with my own roots, and the rules and the rice that make it.