Chapter 4. Talks with translators
from such a community also implies respecting each others’ first-order networks.
This explains the collegial demarcation principle: that translators would not normal-
ly translate a poet known to be networked with another translator.4.5 Afterword
This chapter has begun exploring the crucial central element of Chapter 2’s provi-
sional framework (p. 28): the translator as a thinking and feeling subject who me-
diates between source and target poems. It has given rich insights into five transla-
tors’ perceptions, norms, values and self-images. Moreover, the motifs which
underlie their accounts of practice have given valuable clues to poetry translators’
cognitive and emotional processes and actions, and have added further detail
about their relationships with others. Shih, however, found that interviews with
translators give a better guide to what they believe in than to what they do (2006).
Hence, in Chapters 5 and 6, the final two studies examine how translators translate
two poems which present two different sets of challenges.