Poetry Translating as Expert Action
2.7.3 Profession
Some fields of human action are labelled ‘professions’. How far might this book’s
poetry translators be seen as ‘professionals’ networked into a poetry translating
profession?
One cluster of defining features sees a profession as an occupation involving
special expertise. The analysis earlier in this chapter shows that poems use highly
specialist communicational and linguistic features, such as ambiguity or word-
sound. Hence rewriting such features in another language whilst maintaining links
with source-text features (reconstructing rhymes in the Dizdar extract, for in-
stance), and probably even understanding the source-text features, requires spe-
cial expertise. The occupation criterion, however, is more problematic. Poetry
translators’ pay:time ratio per word rarely earns them a living wage – and so, as
with me in the Dizdar case study, it tends to be done part-time at best.
Another defining feature focuses on ‘vocation’ – that is, a sense of inner drive
or calling. Moreover, professional work is generally held to have social value. Both
are combined in the concept of ‘professionalism’, which Freidson (1994: 210) de-
scribes as
commitment to a particular body of knowledge and skill both for its own sake
and for the use to which is put – that is to say, commitment to preserve, refine and
elaborate that knowledge and skill [...] and [...] to perform it well for the benefit
of others.All these aspects strongly reflect my metacognitive schema of my own action while
revising the Dizdar extract.
Sociologists like Freidson, however, tend to define a profession as a social
process that establishes the field’s members as the only permitted wielders of social
power (Macdonald 1995: 6–35). In this respect, poetry translators seem only
weakly professionalized. Unlike a doctor or a lawyer, one does not need formal
training or qualifications to become a poetry translator. There are few institutions
which regulate how poetry translation takes place, and which allow only accred-
ited poetry translators to practise (the only such structure I know of is the list,
vetted by experienced translators, which literary translators from Dutch must join
in order to benefit from official publication subsidies)^6. Generally, poetry transla-
tion is policed by much looser second-order networks: editors and publishers, say,
who assess whether translators’ output is fit for publishing purpose – or peers,
such as writer and translator W, who recommended me to E.