My oldest son translated my first book. Years ago, I took my kids' English education seriously. I wanted them to enjoy learning the language, and one of my small dreams was for my children to be educated in English. My oldest finished a lyceum in St. Petersburg with an English focus. My younger sons studied there too, until we left for Asia. There, they had to switch to schooling entirely in English. And by that point my oldest had already been accepted into an English-language college in another country. Mission accomplished.
He wasn't exactly thrilled by my request, of course — I understood that translating an entire book was serious work. But in the end we came to an agreement. As he put it: "If your book is about us too, then my translation is going to be conceptual as well."
So I ended up trusting my translator about as much as I trust myself. Actually, more. Because my English isn't anywhere close to my son's level.
I gave him a few instructions about footnotes that needed to be added, to explain to an English-speaking reader what "the Machine-Building Design Bureau" was, for instance. Or the street name "Molodyozhnaya." Or expressions from the book like "obvious to a fool."
My husband spent even more time on it than I did, because he put together an entire multi-page guide: a list of idioms, set phrases, Soviet-era terms and concepts, proverbs, cultural references. Things that don't translate literally into any language, that need adapting and explaining, while still trying to preserve the author's voice.
I thought of translation as a technical task. Word A gets swapped for word B, sentence C becomes sentence D. It turned out that's not the case at all. Translation is interpretation. A translator makes hundreds of tiny decisions, and each one shifts the shade of meaning slightly. Not for the worse, necessarily — just differently.
If someone had told me earlier that translating is like writing the book all over again, I wouldn't have believed them. Now I can confirm it. It's not exactly all over again — but it's close.
And that's probably exactly why good translators are rare. Because it's not only about language. It's about hearing someone else's text and not drowning it out with your own voice.
One of my émigré readers, who lives in the US, prefers to read books in Russian — even though she's lived there for 25 years now. I asked her to read the book in English too, at least selectively, to check how the translation reads. She praised the translation. And added: "I prefer reading authors who write in Russian, in the original, in Russian. Because the soul your book was written with can't be carried across into any other language."