Right. As I’ve said, teaching translation is more of an editing job. You act as editor. But you can have fun with it. One of my favorite tricks was taking a page and having the first student translate it from English into whatever language he or she was working on, and the next one would translate it back into English and then into the foreign language, and we’d go around the room and compare the two English versions at the end, and it would be amazing how much survived. We’d try to analyze which ones were the words that survived and why—because they were older or common or maybe in the grammar, they were more necessary. Things like that were fun.
Gregory Rabassa
from the Rumpus interview with him. The whole interview is just incredible. Gregory Rabassa is the man who almost singlehandedly brought Latin American literature to the US. It is absolutely worth reading it.
(via linguitleteis)