JohnLyly

My aim is to do translations that don’t “feel” translated when you read them, but rather read as if the author were English.

• Energietechnik
• Kunst (allg.)

It’s my aim to combat the phrase “It loses in the translation”. If the translator takes the trouble to get to know the author, looks into possibilities for transferring the authors ideas into the target language then certain things can even “gain in the translation”. This is of course an intuitive process. As a translator one has to find the delicate balance between the conveyance of the author’s ideas and style and the suggestion of additions that the author would have made had he, or she, been English. The process is arduous, but it leads to the difference between “translated” and “Englished”.

I learned German the hard way; I married a German girl who refused to speak English after we flipped a coin and came to live in Germany.
I came to translating through writing. While I was working on a piece about the authorship of the Shakespearian works (see Martin Peake: When was the merchant of Venice written?) see http://www.anonymous-shakespeare.com I discovered that the world’s leading authority on the subject was in fact the German national Kurt Kreiler. I translated a chapter of his book “Shakespeare the Man behind” by way of a free sample and that was the beginning of our working relationship.