Poetry Translating as Expert Action
cognitive with ideological analyses, and translator interviews with think-aloud re-
ports. Case studies of single translators, texts and working teams give depth of
insight, whilst a whole-country survey of translators and their translations gives
breadth of view. And when analysing the data these generate, quantitative meth-
ods, which use statistics to pinpoint underlying trends, are complemented by
qualitative methods, which look for intuitively convincing storylines.1.4.2 You are what you research
The reflexivity principle points out that, when studying human behaviour, the pro-
fession, interests, personality, age, ethnicity, life story and more besides of re-
searchers influences what they research and how, and even what data they find
(Brewer 2003). As for my own profile, I am an Englishman who has published
translations of poetry into Standard English and Northern-English dialects, main-
ly from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (‘BCS’ for short) and Dutch, and I began trans-
lating when I was a student of BCS poetry in 1970s Sarajevo. This has several
implications for this book.
Firstly, my profile and personal contacts have influenced the studies’ design.
English is the target language of all five studies, and four use either BCS or Dutch
as their source language. Chapters 2, 5 (in part) and 6 are based on ‘researcher
introspection’, where I am both the researcher and the translator being researched.
Chapter 3’s survey of recent translated poetry output from Bosnia into English was
inspired by my Bosnian translation work, and inevitably includes projects that I
have participated in. Moreover, most of the translators who supplied the inter-
views and think-alouds for Chapters 4 and 5 were recruited along my own inter-
personal networks. It must be stressed, however, that these languages, regions and
people simply supply the raw data. The conclusions they prompt are meant to be
general – though with English, its status as the world’s most widespread lingua
franca must always be taken into account.
Secondly, the poetry translators supplying data for Chapters 4 and 5 knew
they were speaking to a fellow poetry translator. This almost certainly helped. Spe-
cialists in any domain are more likely to be honest and go into domain-specific
detail with a fellow specialist, especially one whom they already know, than when
speaking with an outsider.
Thirdly, people – individually or jointly – structure perceptions and memories
of external phenomena and events into ‘narratives’: storylines or logical sets of
motivations (Campbell 1998: 34–44; Baker 2006a: 464–471, 2006b). Which narra-
tives one subscribes to depends in part on life experience and social networks.
This is particularly relevant to Chapters 2 and 3, which use poetry translation data
from Bosnia during and after the war that followed its declaration of independence