Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

Chapter 5. Five translators translate 

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

RT1 RT2 RT3 RT4 RT5 RT6 RT7 RT8

Draft 1: Runs-through

Tape-units

Fleur

Geoff

Hugo

Irene

Francis

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

1100

1200

RT1RT2RT3RT4RT5RT6

Draft 2: Runs-through

Tape-units

Fleur

Geoff

Hugo

Irene

Francis

0

100

200

300

400

RT1 RT2 RT3 RT4 RT5 RT6RT7 RT8 RT9

Draft 3: Runs-through

Tape-units

Fleur Geoff

Hugo Irene

Francis

Figure 35. Toen wij: run-through length (tape-units)

This analysis enabled her to assess the poem’s translatability:

TU62 the thought, the idea, the images, the words

TU63 seem fairly simple at first sight, [but] I suspect that when I get down to translat-

ing it,

TU64 it might prove slightly more challenging than I think at the moment.

In Irene’s third pre-translating run-through (RT3: 122tu/9m), she looked up key

source-poem words and noted their translations.

Only in the next run-through, RT4 (266tu/20m), did Irene write her first ver-

sion, twice backtracking to the beginning – both to revise her emerging version,

and to work out the meaning of a new line by updating her mental macrostructure

of the poem’s meaning:

TU398 Viel toen de tijd in # Let’s see: if I can

TU399 reread [my version so far] I might get a feeling of what I should have [here]

RT5 (57tu/4m) quickly debugged the resulting version. Irene then rewrote this as a

pure-line version (RT6: 207tu/16m). She quickly checked this in RT7 and RT8 (12

and 35tu/1m and 3m), without and with reference to the source poem respectively.